






\ 



ERAS AND CHAIIACTERS 



OP 



HISTOEY 



BY 



WILLIAM 11. AVILLIAMS 




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Sri'OFWAS'^»^?S^ 



NEW YORK 

IIARrER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

18 82 
II 



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THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by 

HARPER & BROTHERS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



All rights reserved. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. Nero and Paul 1 

II. TnE Emperor Titus and tiie Apostle John ... 21 

III. MONASTICISM 45 

IV. Augustine and Cihiysostoh C9 

V. BuDDHISil 90 

VI. Wycliffe, Savonarola, and ETuss 110 

VII. Mahometanism 138 

VIII. The Crusades IGO 

IX. Luther and his Times 183 

X. John Calvin 205 

XL John Knox 227 

XII. The Pltiitan and the Mystic 253 

INDEX 277 



ERAS AND CHARACTERS 

OF 

HISTORY. 



I. 

NERO AND PAUL. 

" I APPEAL unto Cresar." Such \vas the brief sentence ut- 
tered in Cicsarea, a sea-coast town of Palestine. The words 
became the occasion for transportini^ the man who uttered 
them to the Koraan metropolis, and placed the great Apostle 
of the Gentiles ultimately before that cruel despot who held 
for the time in his hands the destinies of tlic civilized world. 
Modern science sends its barks and its observers, armed with 
their instruments, round the globe, to watch the transit of a 
planet over the disk of the sun. It might have seemed to 
haughty priest among the Jews, and to the Roman governor of 
this Syrian province, a wild act of presumption for a preach- 
er of this despised faith of the Nazarene to demand thus the 
transfer of his cause to the Emperor's own hearing. If Gallio, 
one of the provincial rulers, scorned to soil his hands with these 
paltry questions of the Hebrew law, as he deemed them, would 
the sovereign Caesar himself have more patience when this 



2 JEBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

setter -forth of a new doctrine presumed to ask heed to his 
complaints regarding a denial of justice in his o\Yn case, in 
one of the remote provinces of that broad empire ? If even 
vouchsafed an audience, Roman scorn might have augured a 
speedy occultation of this Hebrew luminary under the savage 
brightness of a Nero's glance. But the moral may in its great- 
ness rival, or even outbulk, the hugest material interest. The 
judgment of later history is that, if there were eclipse here, 
it was the sovereign despot who underwent the occultation, as 
there stood before him the luminary of the New Faith that 
was to shine where Roman eagles had never flown — the mes- 
senger of the Christ whose final audit was to gather alike each 
Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander and Csesar of all 
the ages before his sovereign bar, there abiding his irrevers- 
ible sentence. 

The name of Nero has become to us of later times the brief 
embodiment of all cruelty and vileness, unequalled ferocity 
and indescribable wickedness. But it should be remembered 
that it was not always such. The first year of his imperial 
sway had been adduced by his preceptor, Seneca, as an example 
of sovereignty showing all clemency. Long after, one of the 
worthier emperors, Trajan, had wished that his own rule 
should equal in dignity the first five years of Nero — a term 
roore than one-third of the fourteen years during which Nero 
wielded the imperial sceptre. He had in him the blood of that 
Julius Caesar, greatest of the name, who, as statesman, orator, 
soldier, and conqueror, had written himself among the fore- 
most names of the human race. Laying, by his victories and 
encroachments on the old republican liberties, the foundation of 
that imperial power which his kinsman Augustus first consoli 



KERO AND PAUL. 3 

dated into a regular dynasty, lie had shattered the Republic 
without himself perfecting and enjoying the despotism that 
■svas to succeed it. Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius had in 
turn occupied the throne that Augustus had established. 
Great as were their crimes, such was the magnificence and vast 
stretch of the power thus set up, and such the promise to the 
nations of order to be enjoyed under its shadow, that Ca2sar's 
name has become almost a synonyme for the rule that shall 
best shut out the anarchy and excesses of an uncurbed demo- 
cracy. In our own times one of the later Napoleons essayed 
to write the life of the great Julius Caesar and the story of 
his services to Rome, the old but outworn Republic, with the 
intent to show to France, after so many centuries had gone by, 
that if she wished regularity and peace in her borders she must, 
like ancient Rome, welcome and cherish the Casar who came 
to repair the shattered ruins and make the arts and commerce 
and literature all flourish. And there have been some Ameri- 
cans who, seeing how magnificently Caesars could adorn their 
capitals and hold down the proletariat, have whispered more or 
less audibly their wish that Order might thus glide into the 
saddle and slip over a docile nation the bridle of sternest re- 
pression upon Western shores. Indeed, some hold the name 
of the Czar of the Russias but a barbarous echo of the old 
Roman Ca3sar, the absolutism that shelters in long security the 
homes and workshops, the fields and cities, of a land. The im- 
mediate predecessor of Nero was Claudius, a man of feeble 
and dull character, but not without literary culture. Agrippina, 
the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage, was the niece of 
Claudius, and she aspired to become her uncle's fourth wife. 
The Roman people, accustomed to much moral recklessness, yet 



4 EliAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

murmured in vain at the proposed unnatural union. Ag-rippina 
found Britannicus, the son of Claudius by his earlier wife, 
Messalina, the rightful heir and successor in expectancy of his 
father. But he was some three years younger than her own 
Nero, the step-son of her new husband. Nero she intended 
to bring in as the next occupant of the throne. Poison, 
ruthlessly administered in the guise of medicine, removed the 
husband. His death was kept a secret until means had been 
taken to present Nero to the populace as the true successor. 
Octavia, the sister of Britannicus, was given him as his wife, 
and the wise philosopher, Seneca, and Burrhus, an old, honest 
soldier, were given him as his guardians, while the more youth- 
ful Britannicus was held back. 

Though of the Csesar blood by the female side, Nero's 
family name was Domitius, and his father had from the color 
of his hair been called Copper-beard (Ahenobarbus). The name 
had adhered to his son, the young prince ; and been used in 
jeer by Britannicus, in that boyish altercation to which lads 
of their age are prone, and had been resented by his step- 
brother, the elder of the two. Instead of it was given him 
the new name, Nero, coming down from the old Sabines of the 
earliest days of Roman history, and meaning, it is said, Strong. 
The name of the great city itself, Rome, meant strength ; and 
besides this, its daily and recognized designation, the metropolis 
had a secret name which it was regarded as treasonable to 
divulge. Many say that this mystic and hidden name was 
" Valentia." If so, it also dwelt upon and intensified the great 
thought of might or power, as the embodiment of Roman 
dignity and the talisman of wide and enduring domination. 
The iron strength of the Roman State, "as iron that breaketh 



NERO AND PAUL, 6 

in pieces and subductli all things," had been foreshadowed in 
the prophetic vision of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel, ii. 40), and 
explained in the divinely inspired comment of Daniel before 
the monarch upon that vision. Power, the power of Northern 
steel — compact, massive, and overwhelming — had been seem- 
ingly all concentred in the State, the metropolis, and the sover- 
ci^n. It was ruGfijed Prowess. 

At the age of seventeen, with much of manly beauty, with 
tastes for art, aspiring and diversified, though not as successful 
as they were eager, Nero vaulted into the imperial throne about 
the time when Paul was, after writing his Epistles to the Thes- 
salonians, leaving Corinth, passing to Jerusalem, and thence to 
Ephesus. In giving him Seneca as the philosophic guide of 
his early age Agrippina had seemed to care for his wise train- 
ing. But when, by a poison administered to Britannicus — his 
young step-brother and the brother of his own consort, the 
young princess Octavia — at a banquet where the step-mother 
Agrippina and the sister Octavia were both present, Britanni- 
cus was flung down dead upon the pavement, the auguries 
were scant indeed that aught of right feeling or of just rule 
could be expected from a sovereign so commencing his reign. 
The death was reported as resulting from epilepsy ; the inter- 
ment was hastened, and the corpse was painted to hide the 
marks of the potent poison and its rapid action. A rain- 
storm that came down washed off this disguise, and revealed 
the true character of the sudden removal. The mother had 
shared, the sister dared not protest against, the murder. In 
his own wild fashion Nero loved his keen-eyed, fierce-souled, 
beautiful, but most ruthless and unscrupulous, mother. The 
■watchword to his troops on one evening in the early stage of 

1* 



6 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Ms reign had been : " Best of Mothers." Nero had a keen 
relish for sculpture and painting, and music and the dance, and 
the drama and even poetry. A line of verse said to be of his 
framing, and j^et preserved, praises the shimmering hues that 
deck the pigeon's neck. If arts, as some suppose, necessarily 
reform and elevate, and win from the grovelling and the brutal, 
the young prince who found himself, with such artistic accom- 
plishments and aspirations, in the possession of absolute power, 
and with the resources and armies and fleets of a wide empire 
at his disposal, should have developed himself into a benefactor 
and a pattern to his myriads of subjects. 

Of Felix, one of his subordinate governors in Syria, before 
whom Paul had appeared and reasoned of righteousness, tem- 
perance, and judgment to come, it has been said by that mighty 
master of language, the Roman historian Tacitus, " that in all 
savageness and profligacy he wielded the power of a king 
with the temper of a lackey." The sentence stands yet an 
incomparable picture of the servile become the despotic. But 
Felix had been a slave and was but a freedman, though now, 
like many freedmen of the time, rising to vast influence and 
affluence. His brother Pallas, also a freedman, had become 
mighty with Claudius, and with Nero after him ; and the au- 
thority of Pallas, the brother, had shielded Felix at Rome 
when the complaints of the Jews followed him from Syria to 
the capital. Flunkeyism, to use a word that Charles Kingsley 
and Thackeray have made classical, is a fearful power when 
vaulting into the seat of sovereignty. It is to be feared that, 
though Nero had never been literally a slave, the tastes of the 
barber and the dancer, the flunkey comrades to whom his child- 
hood had been committed, had imbued the boy with the worst 



KERO AND PAUL. 7 

traits of servile life. Tiic philosophy that Seneca, his in- 
structor, afterward taught him was in some regards higher 
than that known to the Epicurean of the times of Horace or 
the Academe of Cicero. The name of Providence, unknown 
in the high and large sense to Cicero, that great moralist, ap- 
pears on the pages of Seneca, and the recognition also of the 
brotherhood of man. These have seemed to many to imply 
that, through the widely diffused activities and the adventurous 
inculcation of the Gospel on the part of its first converts, the 
lessons of Christian faith were beginning to win, by percola- 
tion and moral infiltration, their quiet way into many layers 
of the Roman Commonwealth where the cvann-elist and the 
apostle were as yet personally unknown. But, be that as it 
may, Seneca with all his philosophic reputation was the apolo- 
gist of some of Nero's earliest excesses, lie could sneer in 
one of his smaller pieces at the professed reception among the 
gods of the Emperor Claudius, ridiculing ruthlessly his per- 
sonal infirmities of speech and aspect. Seneca's own brother, 
the Gallio before whom Paul had once appeared, and whom 
Seneca eulogizes as being, for his amiableness, universally and 
warmly loved, could also, like Seneca, jeer, when he must have 
known that the death of Claudius was a violent taking away 
on the part of a sanguinary, unprincipled wife, at the way in 
which the Emperor had been jerked up among the gods just 
as the bodies of malefactors in old Rome were tugged or 
dragged by hooks to be flung into the Tiber. The one brother, 
Seneca, could mock at the apotheosis of the old, unwieldy Em- 
peror, swollen as a pumpkin, terming it the pumpkinization of 
the poor helpless imbecile ; and the other, Gallio, spite of his 
remarkable amiability, had a bitter laugh instead of sympathy 



8 IJRAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

for the new god whom Rome had so summarily won, in losing 
an old master, as a poison-tipped feather was thrust down his 
throat. It was scarce philosophy of this tone and hue that 
could meet and remedy the terrible evils of Roman society. 
Impatient of his mother's control (for the wily, passionate 
Agrippina both threatened and plotted the displacement of the 
son whom she had exalted when he would not be controlled), 
she was first the object of a matricidal attempt on the part of 
her son to drown her. Escaping this, he sent emissaries to 
despatch her; and it was accomplished with circumstances of 
revolting atrocity. While Paul was as yet at Csesarea this 
murderer of a mother accomplished his design. It must have 
been in the gossip of the barracks among the soldiers who had 
Paul in charge. His young wife, Octavia, was afterward a vic- 
tim, appealing vainly to her husband to spare her as a step- 
sister, if he did not regard her as a wife. This murder was 
probably after Paul had reached Rome, and when the apostle, 
yet detained in confinement in his own hired house, was writ- 
ing to the Christians at Colosse, Philippi, and Ephesus, as to 
his friend Philemon in behalf of Onesimus. 

The turpitudes of Nero's career cannot be stated fully in 
any Christian assembly. Murders, confiscations, profuse lar- 
gesses to the multitude, sustained by the murder of proprie- 
tors and the seizure of their estates and treasures, were soon 
his settled policy. Yet he had his friends and favorites, such 
as they were. Sabina Poppsea, a w^man of reckless character 
but of great beauty, had been taken to his throne, and both 
Agrippina, his mother, and his step-sister wife, Octavia, had 
been sacrificed in her interest. But Poppa^a, as was not nn- 
common in that age of Roman history, leaned to the faith and 



NERO AND PAUL. 9 

rites of the Eastern people ; and Lad at least some favor for 
Jewish usages, Josephus terming her a devout woman. Before 
Paul's arrival there were Christian converts in the household 
establishment of Ca?sar. His salutations in the epistle to the 
Roman Christians, addressed to the household of Narcissus, are 
supposed to refer to slaves in the family of Narcissus, one of 
the powerful and affluent freedmen attached to the imperial 
court. The funeral places, recently brought to light, of some 
of these retainers of Narcissus show their Christian hopes and 
convictions. 

If, in earlier times, when it was yet an age of political free- 
dom and of domestic purity in the old Roman State, it had 
been accounted true nobleness not to despair of the Republic, 
in days of deepest political darkness, when the welfare of the 
nation seemed on the verge of utter ruin from an overmaster- 
ing foreign invader, it certainly argued yet higher virtue, and 
it required more than human support, when there were found 
in the Roman Empire, so sodden with vice and so crushed by 
misrule and oppression, men and women, some of them but 
slaves, poorly housed, poorly fed, and hardly treated, who yet 
could hope for better days and, amid abounding and over- 
whelming social corruption, fear God and love their neigh- 
bor. They hoped, for they could pray to a Heaven ever 
open and always near; they could endure and overcome, be- 
cause they trusted in a Saviour who had become himself as a 
servant, and endured the contradiction of sinners, and as the 
Propitiatory Lamb made atonement for the sins of the world, 
and as the Advocate on high made evermore intercession for 
the transgressors who in penitence sought his grace. 

Seneca had been required, like multitudes of other victims, 



10 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

to commit suicide. Burrhus, the other guardian of Nero, had 
died peacefully. But the old soldier, seeiug his master on the 
stage — which was, according to old Roman notions, a vast so- 
cial degradation — had been compelled by a regard for his own 
safety to applaud the imperial stage-player ; but tears streamed 
down the old soldier's cheeks as he applauded. When Nero 
visited Greece he contended as charioteer and in the other 
games of skill ; and was proud of the crowns which the Greeks 
were ready to lavish upon his assumed superiority — a superi- 
ority not very safely or eagerly to be contested. 

It was said to Ananias of Damascus, in the weeks of Paul's 
first conversion, that Saul as a chosen vessel must bear Christ's 
name before Gentile kings and the children of Israel.'* It had 
been in a most strange fashion that this had been accomplished. 
With all manfulness Paul had gone down into the heart of 
Jerusalem and confronted its elders and its populace, announc- 
ing the Saviour at the peril of his own life and with the sacri- 
fice of all his secular prospects. They had attempted his im- 
mediate massacre. Failing in this, forty of them had banded 
together for a second attempt. The Roman captain had de- 
spatched him to Caesarea under a military escort. lie meets 
the Roman governor. But the Jewish rulers made interest for 
the prisoner's return to Jerusalem, intending to repeat more 
successfully the attempt to quench in blood this missionary 
torch of the Gospel. He was compelled to appeal to Caesar. 

To Gentile and to Jew he had with heroic persistence im- 
parted his testimony. Now, when in the very centre of Jew- 
ish influence they had concerted his death, and these bloody 

* Acts ix. 15. 



NERO AXl) PAUL. H 

fanatics had vowed to starve themselves till they succeeded, he, 
as a lioman citizen and as a Christian ambassador, turned anew 
from Hebrew to pai^an. Through what delay and wrecks lie 
reaches his audience at the Roman capital ! Mclita must be 
evangelized by the way. AVhcn Judaism thus flung him forth, 
he was hurled by the vengeance of his countrymen, and by the 
wonder-working providence of his Blessed Master, to the foot 
of the imperial throne. The catapult which the nation had 
shot for his extermination but speeded him on his mission to 
the hated pagan. It was not to muster there a party against 
the rulers of the Jewish people — he made it his first business 
in the capital to assemble his unbelieving countrymen there, 
and disavow such purpose — but there he must preach Christ in 
all fidelity. A man of mature years, and worn by profuse and 
incessant labors, he was to human judgment little adapted to 
confront and to attract the young sensualist, artist, and despot 
who filled the throne. Nero was but seventeen when he came 
to the purple ; but thirty-one when he died ; and probably 
somewhere about twenty-four years of age when Paul was ar- 
raigned at his tribunal. The New Testament makes no needless 
statement as to Paul's experience there. What power, with all 
its vast, incalculable resources; what art, with all its splendor 
and bewitching attractiveness; what philosophy, with all its 
multiform speculations, from the atheism of Lucretius and the 
Epicureanism of Horace to the academic elegance of Cicero 
and the stoical principles of Seneca, could not secure of hope, 
of alleviation for present evils, of remedy for innermost dis- 
eases, of recovery for the lost, of regeneration — free, sure, and 
abiding — by the blood of the One Oblation, and by the Spirit 
of God freely given to the suppliant — peace beyond the grave, 



12 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

— brotherhood in sinless, endless blessedness before a throne 
compared to which Elysium -was a mere show — all this the 
born Hebrew, Roman freedman by birth, Greek scholar by 
culture, Pharisaic zealot by education, now as Christ's apostle 
proclaimed for a world-wide hearing and proffered as a free 
personal gift to each suppliant. 

In Paul's first hearing he seems to have been, kindly or con- 
temptuously, dismissed by Nero — delivered, as he phrases it, 
from the lion's mouth. His chronology is left by the silence 
of Scripture in some uncertainty. We suppose it the best sus- 
tained probability that he was liberated, and made the journey 
into Spain which he had long contemplated. We think of 
that land now as a distinct country from Italy. It was then 
pervaded by the Latin language, and formed a portion of the 
vast Roman Empire. The Seneca, Nero's philosophic tutor, 
and the Gallio named in the Acts, the brother of Seneca, and 
Lucan, the young poet of the Pharsalia, nephew of Seneca and 
rival and victim of Nero, were all of this same Spain. During 
his absence from the capital, probably, occurred the great fire 
at Rome, when so many habitations were swept away, and 
which Nero surveyed, likening it to the fall of Troy. That 
conflagration, some say of his own kindling, Nero attributed 
to the Christians ; and then began a fierce persecution. The 
victims, wrapped in pitched cloths, and with a sharp stake 
under the chin to keep the face erect, were burnt as torches, 
while, by the lurid light of the terrible ilkimination, Nero, 
robed as a charioteer, mingled with the mob, or urged his 
steeds — a proud competitor for the applause of the rabble on 
his skilled driving. Paul was afterward, probably on some 
fresh complaint of the heathen enemy, sent to Rome ; and this 



NERO Ayn PAUL. . 13 

time it was to die. But in his Epistles to Timotliy and Titu3 
it is the voice, as we read, of the brave and exultant champion 
nearing his goal, and eying his crown, " ready to be offered 
up," for the preceding Sacrifice on Calvary had taken from 
death its sting, and the true apostle was ready to go into the 
other world dauntlessly in the train of the Chief Apostle of his 
profession and of ours. 

Meanwhile, according to British tradition and the notices of 
Roman history, Britain liad been subdued. Caractacus, or 
Caradoc, had been brought captive to Rome ; but by the dig- 
nity of his bearing won the respect of his conquerors. Old 
tradition makes him the convert of the Gospel, with some of 
liis family, in their Roman captivity. Scholars of no mean 
name have held the Claudia and Tudcns of Paul's Epistles 
converts connected with that family and history. Boadicea 
afterward rebelled, and was subdued. But the Roman IMau- 
tius, eminent in an earlier war against Britain, had a wife, 
Pomponia Griccina, who, according to the notices of Roman 
history, seems to have been a convert to the Gospel. Vespa- 
sian served under Plautius, and in this British campaign ac- 
quired the elements of the experience that fitted him to subdue 
Palestine, and trained him to be one of the successors of Nero. 
From quarters so various was Providence calling the avenger. 

The people of the island, thus brought into connection with 
the Empire of Rome and the Gospel of Christ, wield now a 
dominion wider than that of any of the Cffisars. When Paul 
came back to suffer, the people and city and fane that had so 
passionately repelled Paul's message and Master, and hurled 
the apostle away upon Rome, little knew Vespasian's destined 
mission and the recoil of Christ's rejected Gospel on their own 



14 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

heads. If, as the chronology of Conybeare and Howson places 
it, Paul's second appearance at Rome, not this time before 
Nero himself, but probably before some of the assistant 
magistracy of the empire, was in the year 68 — such being 
Paul's date of death — in the same year, too, ended the earthly 
career of the monstrous Nero. He had by largesses bribed 
populace and soldiery ; but his unspeakable excesses and gen- 
eral tyranny made treason and plotting ever recurrent. They 
were soon successful. He would fain have resorted to suicide ; 
but shrunk, in craven terror, after trying the edge of two dag- 
gers. With a strange self-pity that would have been ludicrous 
if not so wretched, he compassionated the world for losing in 
himself so great an artist. lie wished he might travel in 
Egypt or elsewhere, as artist; for an artist, as he said, could 
everywhere find bread and home. Nor, much as we may de- 
spise and abhor the man, can we well forget the magnificence 
of some of his constructions and the wide range of some oth- 
ers that he had in purpose, but never executed. His Baths and 
Golden Palace were, according to all accounts, of great splen- 
dor and beauty. The " Apollo Belvidere " and the " Dying Glad- 
iator" — statues which the world yet admires — came, it is said, 
from what seem to have been the ruins of Nero's edifices; 
and, if so, the eyes of the vile despot looked often on these 
masterpieces of sculpture. It had been his intention to dig a 
canal along the shore of Italy, where Paul landed — an ap- 
proach for commerce ; and still another canal would he have 
dug across the Isthmus of Corinth, where Paul long labored. 
Had his projects been accomplished, the Emperor would have 
left his traces thus on land and sea, unconscious of their vicinity 
to stages in the apostle's career of toil. The scrawl of the 



NERO AXD PAUL. 15 

apostle's pen remains ; the despot's plans ended in cogitation. 
But artist and despot, when death neared, was glad to seek 
shelter in the proffered home of a frecdman some few miles 
from Rome ; crept on all-fours into the humble apartment 
where he might best be sheltered ; and had the aid of a freed- 
man in giving himself the fatal stab, having meanwhile quoted 
verses of Homer on the sound of horses' feet, as he heard the 
tramp of the horsemen sent to seize him. They affected a 
wish to stanch his wounds. He said, "You come too late. Is 
this your fidelity ?'' and expired with horror staring from his 
eyes. Yet affection clung even to his name. It was long be- 
lieved that he might yet return ; and some of the early Chris- 
tians interpreted John's Apocalypse as presenting, in the anti- 
christ, the image of this dreaded and detested persecutor yet 
to return for a new lease of hatred and devastation. 

In his time lived a false Christ, such as the true Saviour 
warned his disciples against, in the Apollonius of Tyanea, 
whom Gibbon, in a sentence of studied impiety, has endeav- 
ored to place on the plane of equality with the Saviour of the 
world. Apollonius was a shrewd conjurer and trickster. His 
life, written long after, when despairing paganism would fain 
evoke a rival for the Christ, who was emptying its temples 
and subverting its most honored fanes, has been in recent 
times, in one of its translations, honored with an epistle said 
to have been composed by Voltaire's pupil, Frederick the 
Great of Prussia. The story is a very clumsy parody. He 
did not confront Nero as Paul did ; and the insipid utterances 
which his biographer records are never likely to replace the 
discourses of the man of Tarsus, or the Sermon on the Mount 
of the Man of Sorrows and the King of Glory. 



16 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

But tbe story may well be recalled, to remind us how varied, 
on the one hand, were the forms of dominant evil with which 
a nascent Christianity, on the other hand, was called to con- 
tend — that evil intrenched in power, enshrined in art, com- 
mended by philosophy, and re-enforced by superstition and 
imposture. The Sufferer of Calvary assured his followers of 
an ultimate triumph ; but he told frankly upon what terms 
of fullest self-sacrifice it was to come. The men whom he 
enlisted had neither the patronage of the empire, nor the 
blandishments of art, nor the honors of a varied philosophy. 
But contrast what they surrendered with what they achieved. 
See them everywhere hunted, maligned, persecuted, tortured, 
and sacrificed. Yet certainly Nero's death, and Seneca's death, 
and Agrippina's death, and Octavia's death were of another 
temper than that which the new faith of the Nazarene inspired 
in myriads on myriads of its converts, trophies of either sex, 
and of every age, and of most varied condition. 

Poor, homeless, and aged, in terms which he cites from his 
assailants, " in bodily presence weak, and in speech contemp- 
tible," what was, nevertheless, Paul's bearing? What is his 
present influence, widening with every Bible dropped from the 
polyglot presses? And where is Nero, and his art, and his 
influence? 

Is the conflict between error and truth yet terminated? 
Has the nineteenth Christian century escaped all need of 
farther toil? He would be a rash and untrustworthy guide 
who should pronounce the long conflict finally and fully 
settled. The glare and blare of the Judgment Day, the trump 
that opens all the graves of the generations, and the glory of 
the Judge descending to confront his re-assembled subjects 



NERO AND PAUL. 17 

of all the centni'ies — these only -will bring the final arbitra- 
ment and solution. Meanwhile, man, as the fallible and the 
presumptuous and the wilful, will cavil, pervert, and rebel. Each 
individual will win or lose his soul apart; and the ancient 
tempter, who plotted in Eden, will be found having only the 
greater rage to mislead and instigate and marshal his dupes, 
in proportion as he finds the tether of his chain shortened, and 
the hour of his final exposure and overthrow impending. Un- 
der this skilful machination, the old heresies will yet pullulate 
in new forms ; and the enmities, for the time abashed and 
renounced as unsatisfactory, will emerge from the entombment 
of centuries, and re-assert themselves under new banners and 
with novel watchwords. But our faith in God's oracles, and 
in the purposes of his blessed dominion long since announced 
by prophet and apostle, may well gather fresh confidence from 
all the struggles and costly victories of the past, and in pros- 
pect of all the recommencing battles of the future. They 
who follow Paul's Master have first in their behalf the eternity 
and indestructibility of truth. As, with regard to the material 
world, all the turmoil on the face of our whirling planet has not 
altered, will not in the long-drawn future alter, the truth as to 
the laws by which that ball revolves, and the influences that 
bind its atoms together, and hold its mass in its due orbit as 
to other worlds in the system. Man may ignore, forget, and 
distort as to his statements concerning this truth in regard to 
the laws of physical being. But the cavil stirs not the world's 
axis, and shifts not its goal. And equally sure, but far more 
august, are the principles of that spiritual and divine truth 
which is the outgush of the Divine Nature. Bards sing and 
sages laud the indestructible, unconquerable energy of truth. 



18 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

And yet, apart from the life morally infused into the conscience, 
soul, and heart of its devout recipients, the truth itself, even as 
to religion and eternity, may become, as Pascal profoundly 
said, an idol. If dissevered from the love of the truth, creed 
and symbol, fought for in the neglect of God and in the hate 
of man, will but hurl the Pharisee into a deeper woe. 

Tlie security of the Church and of the race is, where Paul 
finds it, in a personal and divine Saviour — himself the great 
theme of all the truth in Revelation, and the omnipresent 
guardian and champion of the people who receive that truth 
in the love of it ; the channel of man's approach to God ; the 
great lesson which man, so approaching God, is patiently 
taught; and the ever-welling fountain of new holiness and 
power and might and love to his people — emphatically and 
eternally proving to be, as he proclaimed himself, " the Way, 
the Truth, and the Life." 

Now, Christ, ascending from his own cross and tomb heav- 
enward, deserted not the earth that had rejected him, nor did 
he leave the Jewish nation or the Roman Empire out of the 
purview of his own sovereign enterprise for the subjugation of 
all nations to the obedience of his faith. In his personal pres- 
ence, with this Christ attending and defending him, Paul moved 
to his heroic martyrdom. Ask the apostle the warrant for his 
courage and unfaltering hopefulness, his reply is that this Mas- 
ter has assured him : " My grace is sufficient for thee." And 
the churches, when energetic and aggressive and successful, in 
the ages since Paul's neck went under the headsman's sword, 
have been so by this "grace." Out of their own weakness 
and fewness, amid all their battling foes, and spite of all their 
own conscious and confessed insufficiency and even imbecility. 



NERO AND PAUL. 19 

they have darted the grasp of tlicir prayers, efforts, and plans 
toward tliis grace, free, exhaustlcss, and infinite as is the nature 
and life of God ; and it has upheld them. God has not shift- 
ed with the shiftinjrs of the secular centuries. 

" Grace and trutk came by Jesus Clirist." He is not elbow- 
ed out of his own universe by the last new dream of a super- 
cilious rationalism, or compressed into nothingness by the 
last screw and whirl given to the presses of an atheistic sci- 
ence. AVhcn he came to Bethlehem, though it was in lowli- 
ness and as an infant of days, and with only the anthem of the 
angels around him, the tramp of the centuries was heard be- 
hind him ; and, as the prophet sublimely phrased it, this Prince 
of Peace was "the Father of Eternity." 

The Reformation took up the grace of God, as Paul in his 
Epistles proclaimed it ; and, in the force of that old unworn 
truth re-enforced by the Eternal and Omnipresent Spirit, the 
might of Papal Pome was shivered. The revivals and mis- 
sions of days nearer our own arc but the new application of 
the old truth, and the fresh effluence of that grace. All met 
in the one Christ of God ; himself, though unseen, pervading 
all the ages of human history, and though unrecognized sway- 
ing the centuries of apostasy, as well as those of general, wide- 
spread worship. He awaits calmly the punctual accomplish- 
ment of every pledge, the overthrow, sure and irretrievable, of 
each foe, however inveterate and long dominant. The Christ 
foreran the antichrist, and in serenest supremacy expects the 
collision of the antagonist forces. When Paul went down, 
as to pagan magistrate and Jewish maligncr it must have 
seemed, into defeat and silence, the Lord was, as the more dis- 



20 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

cerning eyes of the apostle perceived, the real out-gate of the 
struggle, but putting on his servant's brow " the crown of 
righteousness," and reserving the like recompense for "all 
them also who love his — the Master's — appearing." We in- 
herit the conflict, and are invited to share the reward. 



TEE EMPEROR TITUS AXD THE APOSTLE JOIIX. 21 



11. 

THE EMPEROR TITUS AXD THE APOSTLE JOUX. 

When Paul reviews his own struggles and sacrifices in the 
cause of the Gospel, he adverts to his having "fought with 
beasts in the guise of men at Ephesus."* Fellow -confessors 
with hira for Christ were in no distant day flung to the 
leopard and the tiger and other ravening brute beasts in the 
amphitheatre. lie himself had not encountered thus the 
clasping paws of the bear or the claws and white teeth of the 
lion ; but pagan traders, makers and venders of idol shrines, 
fanatics alike for their creed and their greed, had shown a 
brutal ferocity as they clamored for hours, " Great is Diana 
of the Ephesians ;" and this mob, unless restrained and soothed, 
had torn, limb from limb, the Hebrew apostle who preached 
fearlessly the one Holy Jehovah, emptying all the world's 
pantheons, and incarnate in the only Saviour, Christ, as the 
one light and hope of the race. Ephesus, the city of these 
deadly risks to Paul, had, far back as the days of Herodotus, 
been the point where the sea-borne travel and traffic of Europe 
touched land, as it took its course to the marts and capitals 
and schools and shrines and mines of the far East. Declined 
from its old power and splendor, the great seaport had, in the 

* 1 Corinthians xv. 32. 
2 



22 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. 

days of Augustus, been restored to a sliare of its old influence, 
and was held the metropolis or mother city of five hundred in- 
ferior and dependent cities. Its great temple was, for mag- 
nificence and affluence and resort, one of the wonders of the 
ancient world; and pilgrimages and gifts made it rich and 
famous throughout the civilized nations of heathendom. For 
three years the apostle had with tears, night and day, warned 
the converts there given him. When on his way to Jerusalem 
he sent for the elders of the church at Ephesus to meet him at 
Miletus, its outlying maritime dependency, some thirty miles 
away, and warned them of the "spiritual wolves" that should 
arise among themselves.* Some two years afterward at Rome, 
a prisoner, about the time when Nero had married Poppaea 
and sacrificed Octavia, Paul writes to his Ephesian converts, 
" an ambassador in bonds," wafting back their thoughts to the 
eternal grace, which before the foundation of the world had 
schemed their rescue, and then, with all pathos and tenderness, 
turning to the present time, their duties and their snares, and 
to the future time, and its prospects and retributions ; warning 
them against discouragement and bidding them take "the 
whole armor of God,"f he entreats them to remember in 
prayer him, their fellow-sufferer and fellow-combatant. Some 
thirty years and more (or the ordinary lifetime of a genera- 
tion) had gone by since Paul had been laid in his quiet grave, 
when to the same Ephesian church another apostle, the last 
survivor of the band, the aged John, when warning the seven 
churches of Asia, addressed these Ephesian disciples, in the front 
line of those seven churches, to congratulate them for having 



* Acts XX. 29. \ Ephesians vi. 13. 



THE EJIPEROIl TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHX. 23 

rejected false apostles, but to deplore the wanini^ of tlicir first 
love, and to warn tlicin in the Master's name that, unless they 
repented and returned to their first works, their candlestick 
should be removed from its place. It was from Patmos John 
wrote, thus reporting a distinct message of the Lord God — the 
Alpha and the Omega of all hope, all revelation, and all re- 
demption — a message heard with John's own cars from Christ's 
own lips, and written down by that wrinkled, aged hand at 
Christ's explicit command. When Apollos an<l Paul had 
brought, to the fathers and more aged brethren of these con- 
temporary Ephesian Christians, the word of life, the magic arts 
and characters of Ephesus, which had long been famed through 
all the Roman Empire, had been renounced by the newly won 
disciples; and books of the class to the value of fifty thousand 
pieces of silver had been given to the flames, so mightily grew 
and prevailed the word of the one true Lord. "Was not such 
warning as this, of danger lest the candlestick of the divine 
favor and ministrations should be dislodged from among them, 
a requirement of sacrifice as stern, to their own false and easy 
hopes, as had been exacted in the generation gone before? 
After sending from Patmos, his rocky place of exile, this sol- 
emn and startling message, John, the Beloved Disciple himself, 
when his banishment was ended, returned according to the old 
tradition to take up at Ephesus the charge from which death 
had removed Timothy. The Turkish name of the place — 
Ayasaluk, now a little village — is supposed to be a distorted 
reminiscence of the Greek name given to the old and last sur- 
viving apostle, as the Saint Theologian ;* just as Stamboul, the 

* 6 aywQ OeoXoyog. 



24 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

modern Turkish name of their seat of empire, is but an un- 
couth distortion of an old Greek phrase of the surrounding 
peasants when they talked of going "up to town."* A fisher- 
man by the lake of Gennesaret when the Master first called 
him to become a fisher of men — surviving, by a singular ar- 
rangement of Divine Providence, the twelve Caesars, as they 
are called, and all the others beside himself of the twelve apos- 
tles — writing the last of the four gospels, and surviving to re- 
ceive and record, as we hold it, the last book of the New Testa- 
ment, the visions, portents, and warnings and glories of the 
Apocalypse, his career nearly filled up the first Christian cen- 
tury. But, reaching extreme age, his is not a name to be added 
to the poet's distich, as to the worthies who have outlived their 
fame and their faculties : 

" From Marlborough's eyes see tears of dotage flow, 
And Swift expire, a driveller and a show." 

The aged, he had been beloved in his early career of the 
Divine Master; and now he is beloved of the churclies in his 
closing days, and, when for weakness he cannot longer preach 
or write, he is borne into the assemblies of the disciples to say, 
" Little children, love one another." 

Among all the names of the emperors, who from Rome 
lorded it over the world throughout that first century, none 
shows, on the whole, a fairer and less blemished record than 
Titus. Men his contemporaries hailed him as the delight and 
darling of mankind. Far down in the Christian centuries 
critics and poets like Boileau have eulogized him in lines so 

* HQ raix TToXiv, rafi being the provincial corruption for ttjv. 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AND TEE APOSTLE JOIIX. 



or. 



eloquent and rausical, that Boilcau's royal master, Louis XIV., 
not unacquainted with the adulation so rife in royal ears, re- 
quired the praises of this old Roman conqueror to be read 
three times over. And Racine, the tragedian, and Metastasio, 
the Italian dramatist, have lavished their poetic art on the 
same grateful theme, enhanced in the case of the last by some 
of the best music of Mozart. Titus -svielded armies and reared 
monuments, as the fisherman apostle could never claim to do. 
Exile, prisoner, and in purpose and suffering not only con- 
fessor, but, far as the might of his persecutor, the brother of 
Titus, Domitian, could effect it, a martyr also, John was, spite 
of all these disadvantages, blessed, and the channel of blessing 
to others. Human magnanimity, and beneficence, and generos- 
ity, and clemency, and self-control displayed their powers in 
the Emperor. The charity coming down from heaven, and 
guiding and winning other souls heavenward, had, at the bar 
of Caiaphas, at the foot of the Master's cross, in the porch of 
the Temple at Jerusalem, in the face of Herod and of Domi- 
tian, on the rocky shores of Patmos, and on the green slopes of 
Gennesaret, and within the hewn sides of the tomb of Joseph 
of Arimatha?a, its exemplar in John. It may be not an ill use 
of time to ask which of these two contemporaries, the one a 
sovereign ruler and the other a mere subject, had the more 
heart-felt peace — which has left, for his fellows and all after 
ages, the more august and blessed memory ? 

Rank has, in worldly judgment, its rights of precedence. 
Let us begin with the Emperor. He had the reverence of 
Josephus, the Jewish historian ; and the friendship of Tacitus, 
whom he advanced and cherished. But the portion of the 
great Roman historian's work that portrays Tiberius and Nero 



26 ERAii AND CR'ABACTERS OF HISTOMY. 

has survived ; that which described Titus has now perished, it 
is feared, irrevocably. When Nero, in tlie seventeenth year of 
his age, ascended the imperial throne, his step-brother, Britan- 
nicus, a lad of fourteen, as the son of Claudius really entitled 
to the throne from which Agrippina had plotted to exclude 
him, was indulged with associates of like age. Titus, the young 
son of an officer making his w'ay to fame and power — Vespa- 
sian — then a lad of fifteen, one year older than Britanniciis 
and two years younger than Nero, was brought up in the pal- 
ace, sharing the sports, studies, and meals of Britannicus. Even 
in that day of license some moderation was held decorous for 
youth, and in great imperial banquetings these youths were 
served at a side table on somewhat simpler fare, but in the 
presence of the guests, older, and more sumptuously served. 
The wines of the Romans were often administered tepid or 
even hot. When the unhappy Britannicus was to be thrust 
into the grave by his cruel supplanter, Nero, the cup was pre- 
sented to Britannicus so warm that he refused it. The wine 
it contained was harmless ; but cold water was brought to tem- 
per it, and in that water was intermingled the fatal poison of 
most rapid operation. Titus, his comrade, is said to have, ac- 
cording to the usages of the day, shared in the cup of his young 
friend, Britannicus, and from the effect of the poison (though 
probably in his case more scantily partaken) his health long 
suffered. 

Of great gentleness and buoyancy of temperament, with a 
taste for study and poetry, in Greek as in Latin a ready, prompt 
orator, he was a general favorite. His proficiency in short- 
hand writing was also remarkable ; and in imitating the hands 
of others he was so dexterous that he once gayly said he could 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOIIX 27 

become, if lie cliosc, the best counterfeiter in Rome. In an 
age wlien forged wills and signatures were not rare or unre- 
munerative, it was a perilous accomplishment. Amid the cor- 
ruption of that court the young Titus, though popular, was 
not unsullied. It was the wisdom of his father, Vespasian, 
serving at the time successfully abroad, to remove his young 
son from the blandishments of the capital, that he might share 
the exposures and hardships of the camp. lie was a brave 
and skilful soldier, winning the affection of his comrades; and 
campaigning in Britain and Germany had made for him an 
early military reputation. \Yhen his father, Vespasian, was 
sent into Palestine, Titus accompanied him, and remained there 
to press the invasion and siege which his father could not per- 
sonally continue. It was there that he learned to know the 
Berenice, sister of Agrippa, who is named in the Acts as one 
of the hearers before whom Paul stated his history and argued 
his case. A woman of rare beauty, and of very great wealth, 
with that leaning to Greek culture and art which marked the 
Ilerodian family, Berenice fascinated the young Roman prince, 
and, although some years his senior, wielded over him the pow- 
er which the Egyptian Cleopatra had swayed over an earlier 
soldier of Rome, Mark Antony. Titus pressed with energy 
and skill his measures against the Jews. With a fated ob- 
stinacy and fanaticism they continued their resistance, expect- 
ing from God a miraculous interposition for their deliverance, 
such as their fathers had found in earlier times, but which 
these rejecters of God's incarnate Son had no right to antici- 
pate. The horrors of the wav and siege, as painted by a Jew- 
ish writer, Josephus, we need not essay to recall ; slaughter, 
conflagration, rapine, famine, and pestilence wasted the land 



28 EBAS AXD CRABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and its beleagured capital. Titus, against his own wishes, saw 
the sanctuary given to the flames; and Jerusalem, after having 
been made by intestine feuds a slaughter-pen of its inhabitants, 
was given over to the sword, firebrand, battering-ram, and 
pickaxe of the Roman invader. The sister of him who had 
said to Paul, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," 
could not have been without some vao-ue knowledo:e both of 
the old books of the prophets and of the new faith of the great 
Prophet of Xazareth. But, radiant and prosperous and fashion- 
able, she probably could little re-enforce what juster views of 
duty and life and destiny beyond the grave must at times have 
flashed on the mind of Titus. After the fall of Jerusalem 
Titus visited Egypt and presided at the installation of the sa- 
cred bull. Apis, there — a rather plain intimation that the influ- 
ence of his Hebrew acquaintances, Josephus, and Berenice, and 
Agrippa, had done little to shake his pagan habits. 

Popular and kindly, but loving pleasure, and the table, and 
the wine-cup as he did, discerning men had rather dreaded 
that, when Titus should acquire supreme power, he would 
prove but a good-natured Nero. But when, by the death of 
his father, brought to the throne he gloriously and quietly re- 
futed these auguries. Accessible to all, generous, self -con- 
trolled, wishing, as he said, no citizen to leave his Emperor's 
presence with sad visage or heart, he was magnanimous even 
to his enemies. Some young nobles who had plotted his 
death were spared, invited to his table, and a messenger was 
sent to the anxious mother of one of them, to warn her against 
dreading for the treason of her son his speedy death. Domi- 
tian, a most unworthy brother, plotted against him, and would 
fain spread the tale that the father, Vespasian, had by will left 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AMJ THE AlVSTLE JoHX. 29 

liiiii, Domitian, a sliarer in the empire. Most fraternally Titus 
expostulated with bis false-hearted and unnatural kinsman, and 
besought his confidence and made him a sharer of bis power. 
He completed the Coliseum, that great, massive monument 
which the strangers visiting Home yet admire in its ruins; 
and be reared that Arch of Triumph for the conquest of Jeru- 
salem which yet preserves the image of Jewish candlestick 
and trumpets and table of shewbread, linking the eye of mod- 
ern gazer to images which Solomon, and which Moses before 
Solomon, bad shaped by God's bidding. AVhcn a fire of three 
days had largely wasted Rome, of his own means Titus sought 
to repair the damages, not accepting the proffered aid of his 
people. lie vowed never to stain his hands with blood of the 
senators, and kept, spite of provocation, his vow. Finding the 
marriage of a foreigner and Jewess unpopular, lie dismissed 
Berenice, though himself loath to make the sacrifice, and she 
as loath to be dismissed from the place of queen to which be 
would fain have raised her. lie exclaimed one evening, "I 
have lost a day 1" because on that day he had conferred no gift. 
Such were his traits that he was regarded in the language of 
the times as " the love and delight of the human race." True 
to the friendship of his boyhood, he raised in the palace a 
statue of gold, and another of ivory, to the young Britannicus, 
who had been poisoned at his side. 

But the calamities of that great eruption of Vesuvius which 
buried Pompeii and Ilerculaneum darkened bis reign. A son 
of that Felix and Drusilla named in the Acts, and that son's 
wife, were among its victims besides the elder Pliny. Its lava- 
clad relics tell yet a hideous tale of the corruptions of the age 
as prevalent in these outlying surburban towns, and much 



30 Eli AS AND CHARACTEItS OF HISTORY. 

more as dominant in tlie metropolis, tlie fountain of tlieir 
provincial fashions. A fearful pestilence followed in the train 
of the eruption. But the heart of the Emperor had woes be- 
sides of its own ; and while presiding at a public entertain- 
ment he was seen bursting into tears. He sought retirement, 
but a fever which showed itself proved intractable. When 
the symptoms of death were becoming visible he opened the 
curtains of his litter, and looking heavenward complained that 
he did not deserve to die so early ; and remarked that but 
of one act in all his life did he repent. What this one act 
could be the survivors had various judgments. A reign of but 
two years two months and twenty days was indeed deplorably 
brief, for one hailed as the darling of mankind ; but whatever 
the pagan might judge, there had been acts of his early career 
that were in the eyes of moralists not thus lightly to be dis- 
missed. Some charged his truculent and heartless brother, 
Domitian, with hastening his death by a snowbatli or even by 
poison. Of beneficence and self-control learned in a high 
station, when it had been lacking in his more private years, 
of generosity and ready sympathy, he was indeed, in his high 
post and with his rare temptations, a wondrous exhibition. 
Neither the avarice of his father, nor the sullen, malignant 
ferocity of his brother, Domitian, clung to him. And arch, 
and amphitheatre, and medal, and the page of history attest 
his greatness. A poem that his brother, Domitian, wrote on 
the Fall of Jerusalem has disappeared. Let paganism have its 
exultant remembrance of him as hero and worthy of no vulgar 
mould. 

The Jew had a keen and vivid dislike of the conqueror of 
his race, the waster of the sanctuary, and the ravager of Pales- 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AXD TUE APOSTLE JO UN. 31 

tine. It is one of the Talmudic fables that Titus, on occasion 
of a storm in the seas befalling him, challenged the Hebrew 
God, as powerful over the waters just as lie had been in 
Pharaoh's times, but denied his ability to overthrow him on 
the land. God, the Hebrew legend asserts, sent a fly or gnat 
which, entering the Roman's nostrils, fastened and fattened on 
his brain. For seven years, say they, the pain grew keener. 
One day, Titus passing a foundery noticed that with the re- 
sounding blow of the foundery-hammers the insect his torment- 
or seemed cowed and lulled. lie paid, says the story, a high 
price for hammering to be each day continued at his side, that 
thus he might be relieved. But the inner plague soon recov- 
ered from its fears and resumed its torturing. A Jew, whose 
name is given by the lying legend, said that after the death 
of Titus he saw the head opened, and the insect, grown to a 
swallow's size, with iron beak and brass claws, was of incredible 
weight. The strange fable illustrates only the deep hatred his 
conquests had bred in the Hebrew people, his victims. 

But yet, with culture, power, wealth, kindliness, popularity, 
and numberless allies, and the countless appliances of a mighty 
empire at his command, what were the Emperor's bestowments 
on the human family, compared with those which God wrought 
by the latest survivor of the apostolic band, in poverty, iso- 
lation, and the decrepitude of age I 

The son of Zebedee, born beside the Galilean sea, John, was 
probably somewhat younger than our Lord. It is a tradition 
of one Father (Xicephorus) that he was the cousin of John the 
Baptist. There was apparently close acquaintance between 
the households. That his father's family was of some wealth 
may be inferred from the acquaintance he seems to have had 



32 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

"with the High-priest's household at the time of the Master's 
apprehension. Called first, by the teachings of Christ's fore- 
runner, to anticipate the claims and to behold the near ap- 
proach of the Messiah, he early renounced the care of his fa- 
ther's bark and nets, to become the self-denying attendant of 
the great Teacher. But though promised to be made a fisher 
of men, he seems not to have had anything of the lofty culture 
of some later converts like Paul and Apollos. When the 
Saviour yielded himself a meek victim to his foes, the faith 
and hope of the disciples seem to have been shut up in the 
tomb of the lost Master, though love, stronger than either, 
cherished the beloved memory, and sought, at the first rumor 
of a new appearance of the Lord, the sepulchre where he had 
been laid. John's mother, Salome, seems to have been a 
Avoman accustomed to the responsibilities of secular employ- 
ment. Left probably early a widow, she may have continued 
in conduct of the business that her sons had abandoned. But, 
true to their fancied interest, she intercedes to ask for them 
a high place in the Messiah's kingdom. Like the women of 
the same class in modern Holland, Scotland, and England, we 
may suppose her energetic, but, though rugged, not coarse. 
The fishermen's wives and mothers of Paris were a terror in 
the Great Revolution of France ; but the women, some of them 
of the like class, who from Galilee attended the journey of 
Christ, were of other mould and temper. 

When fully confirmed in the truth, John, in that temple 
which had been the scene of Christ's disregarded teachings, 
met and taught the multitudes. With the splendor and pow- 
er of Pentecost upon him, he could and did defy the rage and 
might of the rulers; and "a great company of the priests" 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHX. 33 

became obedient to the faith. Intrusted by his Saviour on 
the cross with the charge of his widowed mother, some have 
seen in this an evidence that John was married, and have 
leaned, in consequence, to the tradition of some authors that 
he was the groom in the wedding- feast at Cana, and tliat 
Mary, our Lord's mother, was thus installed a most honored 
guest with the wife already mistress of his home. Be this 
as it may, when his own brother and fellow-apostle becomes 
a martyr, he is not disheartened. "When the Gentiles are ad- 
mitted to the full, equal fellowship of church privileges, he 
is not averse. AVhen the omens that our Saviour had given 
of the approach of the desolation of Jerusalem and Palestine 
present themselves, he, with other Christians of the Hebrews, 
as Christ had charged them, flee from that metropolis to 
which the unbelieving and obdurate of their countrymen 
trooped as to a sure refuge, to find it only a prison and 
death-trap. 

Not for selfish case, not in vengeful glee, go forth that 
band of true patriots. As Christians, everywhere bonds and 
imprisonments, tortures and death, awaited them. But a 
faith dearer by all these new dread attestations of its divine 
origin, a Master found to come nearer as the world drew far- 
ther apart from them — this faith and this Master cheered their 
exile, and gave energetic exultation even to their martyrdom. 

In the latest visit of Paul to the Jewish metropolis and 
Temple, John was probably absent on his range of mission- 
ary testimony and travel. When God has not seen fit to re- 
cord in Scripture the statement, tradition has it that Parthia 
was the scene of his apostolate through many years. Peter 
died, and Paul, too, had gone; but in the after -appearances 



34 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of John is no trace of wavering confidence or of growing en- 
feeblement. The tradition of early Christians has it that he 
was thrown by Domitian, the successor of Titus, into a cal- 
dron of boiling oil, but by miraculous interposition emerged 
unharmed. In advanced years he is said, in one of his tours 
for evangelization, to have proselyted and baptized a young 
man of promise, whom he commended earnestly to the resi- 
dent Christian pastor. On revisiting the place the aged apos- 
tle learned that the youth, under evil associations, had become 
apostate and reckless, and was now heading, in the mountains, 
a band of robbers. Undaunted by years and toil and peril, 
the apostle went in quest of the prowler; was, at his sum- 
mons to that effect, led by the robbers capturing him to their 
chief, whom he recognized as his backslidden convert. The 
youth, hardened and abashed, would have fled, but was so ten- 
derly and winningly pursued by the loving apostle that the 
appeals, under God's blessing, won back the stray soul. It is, 
say some, in allusion to this incident that John talks, in one 
of his epistles, of young men knowing the strength of Christ, 
as by him (the Christ) they have overcome the world. Of 
Lis zeal it is told that, when he found Cerinthus, one of the 
great leaders in the error against which his epistles and Paul's 
protest, was in the public bath which he had entered at Ephe- 
sus, the indignant apostle suddenly left it, exclaiming that he 
was afraid lest God should fling it down in ruins on the head 
of so flagrant an offender. The love which we habitually im- 
agine as too easy and indulgent to be severe was, in this son 
of thunder, a fervid and resolute zeal, alike firm in its con- 
clusions and stout in its protests, accepting no compromise, 
and resenting all perversions. 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AXD THE APOSTLE JOHN. 35 

But, ^vitll licrcsy already plaguing the professed Cliurch, 
and with heathenism so corrupting society all around — with 
the memories of a Judaism so plagued by divine judgments, 
and yet so embittered in its continued rejection of the one 
Messiah — what was there, in the lot of the lonely, toil-worn 
apostle, to sustain this zeal and feed the llames of his holy 
courage with new fuel ? Only review bis career and his work, 
and it will be seen how tlic soul of him who takes hold on 
God has the centuries and the destinies on his side. "When 
he can no longer pursue his tours, long, and lonesome, and 
wearisome, the Spirit of God can guide the unskilled pen, and 
make the fisherman's hand, that was once moist with the net- 
ropes on the Galilean sea, and shining with the scales of the 
finny prey, his captures, now to wield the stylus which is to 
smite a false philosophy, and to carry its sentences of loving 
adjuration or of irresistible doom to the synod and the syna- 
gogue, the catacombs where a hunted Christianity held its 
covert assemblies, as to the temples and judgment-seats where 
paganism still practised its sacrifices, conned its oracles, and 
uttered its death-bans. Like one of his early pupils and con- 
verts, Polycarp, he was joyous as the work grew harder and 
the end grew nearer. 

We suppose the evidence to be overweighing and unanswer- 
able that his was the latest of the gospels, and that yet later 
was his Apocalypse, received of the re-appearing Master's own 
lips, as that Son of Man, once so familiar, so accessible and 
so tenderly beloved, revealed himself with new majesty ; and 
even the beloved disciple fell fainting before tlie feet that 
glowed with the white heat of brass in the core of the blaz- 
ing furnace. It has, as Greek, its own idioms, and perhaps 



36 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

some of its grammatical turns may to purists seem question- 
able. But the first Napoleon wrote a hand often quite un- 
decipherable except to experts ; and when read its spellings 
were not found immaculate. But these defects, did they im- 
peach the force of the sentences or lumber the directness 
that, like a cannon-ball in its energy, sought its aim and 
reached what it sought? And when the Carpenter's Son, as 
men sneeringly called him, chose the fisherman of the Gali- 
lean lake for his scribe, who shall refuse the oracle that has 
the world's Maker behind it ? 

Let us frame the supposition that, in the grace of God, the 
Emperor who as the lieutenant of his father, Vespasian, carried 
the Eoman legions over the walls and into the most sacred 
shrine of the Jewish metropolis, had become himself a convert 
to the faith of the Nazarene ; and now sought to make his 
post and sway the means of speeding the Gospel over the 
nations. In what mode would he have probably sought to 
aid, in their work and influence, those of the apostles yet 
surviving, and the apostolic men, their converts and coadju- 
tors? Domitian, it is said, once summoned some of Christ's 
kindred by blood into his presence ; and finding their unam- 
bitious and unworldly character, dismissed them again, safely 
but quite scornfully. Conceive of his predecessor on the 
throne, his brother Titus, having met and learned to esteem 
and revere John ; in what fashion would the imperial neo- 
phyte have sought to advance the designs of the holy son of 
Zebedee? "Would he have announced his purpose to send a 
rescript to every province and chief city, commanding that 
officers, civil and military, open judgment-seats for preaching, 
and hire chaplains for each soldiers' barrack ? AYould he have 



THE EMrEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHy. 37 

proffered large drafts upon the treasury to reward conversions 
of important personages ; and indicated his settled purpose to 
give a full share of dignities and posts to the most promising 
and prompt among the new accessions to the Church? Simon 
Magus, if still alive, would have bounded with delight into the 
field, anxious to renew the proffer that Peter had so indig- 
nantly repudiated. The arch trickster and magician, Apollo- 
nius of Tyanrca, who claimed, in fact, to have instructed Ves- 
pasian and Titus, and to have predicted the exact death-hour 
of Domitian, would, under such new presentations of the path 
to worldly power, have intimated early his own willingness to 
accept an apostolate. But where — if such were their hire, 
their motives, and their commission — would the new Balaams, 
intent to bless the Church which the Csesar was thus fostering, 
would these mercenary emissaries be found, when results were 
scrutinized, as to the genuineness of the conversions they 
secured ; and where was the moral influence of tlic revolu- 
tions thus inaugurated by "Demases," as Paul described them, 
who "loved this present world?"* The Divine Master, him- 
self a meek cross-bearer, summoned and would own only cross- 
bearing disciples, who loved not home or life in comparison 
with himself. This new evangelization would have erased 
these enlistment terms of the Great Captain of our Salvation ; 
and Lucifer and Mammon and Belial would have taken his 
place, and would have put the lust of the flesh, the lust of the 
eyes, and the pride of life on creed and banner, as the motive 
powers of the great social change. The gates of Hell would 
have usurped the mercy -seat of redemption and the throne 

* 2 Timothy iv. 10. 



38 ERAS AND CHARACTEMS OF HISTORY. 

of the final Judgment. If Caesar were really regenerate, lie 
would feel that the weapons of the novel warfare were only 
spiritual ; and that his prayers to the Omnipresent Christ and 
the Omnipotent Paraclete were really more needed and more 
available than all his bannered legions and all his overbrimmed 
treasuries. 

John, as the self-denying apostle of a crucified Saviour, 
would teach others, as he had been taught himself, that "the 
world heareth not," willingly, any others than them who " are 
of the world ;" and that the man who " knoweth God," en- 
lightened and renovated by his Spirit, "heareth us," recog- 
nizing aright the gospel and its heralds.* He paused not for 
the world's endorsement of his proclamation. He had re- 
ceived a more august commission, and moved to Parthia, if 
such his field of testimony, as some fathers say, as he had 
moved before through Palestine, and as in later years he 
traversed Asia Minor, eying only and ever a Divine Helper, 
and delivering a God-given message. 

"Was Jerusalem, the sacred city of his fathers, laid in ruins, 
and was the Land of Promise casting out its plundered and 
harried inheritors into poverty and exile and contumely among 
the Gentiles — the old fane of Solomon razed to the dust, the 
lineage of Aaron lost, and the sacrifices of so many centuries 
interrupted, with no hope of resumption for either priesthood or 
victim ? The Master had forewarned of all ; and his tears, as he 
sat on Olivet and foretold this impending ruin, but enhanced 
the truth of his gospel, and showed the divine depths of his 
compassion. Early admonished, the Hebrew Christians had 

* 1 John iv. 5, 6. 



TUE EMPEROR TITUS AND TEE APOSTLE JOHN. 39 

fled, John probably among thein ; but not to sullen silence and 
to grim despair. Over the \vreck of the Hebrew polity tow- 
ered the brighter hopes of the Gentiles. The world's Shiloh 
emerged from the shattered shell of Judaism. Men have en- 
deavored to show that Paul stood alone among the apostles in 
welcoming the aliens of the Gentiles, without requiring of them 
submission to llebrew ritual before their admission into Chris- 
tian fellowship. But John's gospel, recording the words of 
John's Kedeemer, represents him as saying : " Other sheep I 
have which arc not of this fold : them also I must bring."* 

And when the Gentile churches, gathered by Paul and others, 
at Ephesus were decimated by persecution, and deprived of 
their old llebrew teachers like Paul, John, without stint of sym- 
pathy and without hint of alienation, recognized their right to 
Christian ordinances and fullest equality of fraternization. He 
did not think it beneath him to build on these Gentile foun- 
dations of his brother -laborer Paul, the great apostle of the 
Gentiles. 

Peter, the ultimate coadjutor of John, who had with John 
waited in the high-priest's antechamber, and shared with John 
in the hurried visit to the vacated sepulchre, had been frankly 
withstood and censured by Paul, when wavering for a time, as 
to such free access and welcome to be accorded to the Gentiles. 
And now — when Peter, ere his own martyr death, had solemnly 
and with rare magnanimity endorsed the epistles of his be- 
loved censurer, Paul, as inspired and unquestionable ; and now 
that both Paul, the reprover, and Peter, the reproved, had sunk 
into one glorious martyr rest — John, the survivor, comes for- 

* John X. IG. 



40 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HIST DRY. 

ward, in all Asia, and for all after ages, proclaiming the founda- 
tions thus laid to have been those virtually planned by the eye 
of the Great Architect, who surveys all the churches and holds 
in his one right hand all the torches, the heaven - kindled 
" stars " of their true ministry and legitimate ordinances. 

It was a most gracious arrangement of the Divine Provi- 
dence thus to save, for the finalities of Revelation, the ripe age 
and wide experience of one who had been among the earliest 
proselytes of Christ, and who, as a favored disciple, had leaned 
on the Master's bosom just when the treason of Judas was on 
the eve of its explosion, and the sacrifice of the Propitiation 
was about to be consummated. The earliest was thus, in God's 
wisdom, made the latest apostolic proclaimer of the faith, 
world-wide in its gracious welcome, as it was world-wide in its 
solemn claims and stern alarms. His single personality runs 
through the earliest Christian century, and bolts together the 
entire fabric of the New Testament. 

Writing the last gospel, he also received from the revelations 
made in Patmos, the scene of his insular exile, the contents of 
the closing pages of Revelation. The tenderness that belonged 
to his character did not eliminate the features that made the 
Reader of all hearts denominate him, and his brother long since 
dead, as sons of thunder. The position has been questioned, 
but we think the balance of evidence overwhelming, that the 
true date of the Apocalypse was in the time of Domitian, and 
in the closing years of the first century. Behind, then, the 
receiver of the oracles we hear the voice of Him that shaped 
Eden and that shook Sinai, in the solemn words, the bolts 
shutting up the Book as final and unamendable : If any man 
add, God shall add to him every plague. If any man retrench 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AXD THE APOSTLE JOHX. 41 

and take away, God shall take away that man's part of the 
blessings written anywhere and everywhere in the dread volume. 
The writer of that book declared he had once heard seven 
thunders utter their voices, during another stage of the fearful 
disclosures made to him. In these awesome sentences of the 
son of Zebedee we recognize the " son of thunder," and out 
of that human organ peal the tremendous accents of Ilim who 
blesseth and it is blessed, but who curscth and it is cursed, by 
an inevitable and irrepealable woe. 

Some have contrasted the portions contributed by Paul and 
by John to the divine oracles, and have enlarged on the difli- 
cultics and involutions of language and thought, as they be- 
lieve them, which make hard of comprehension and of exposi- 
tion the sentences of Paul. But within this very year the 
missionary of one of our American churches, laboring as Script- 
ure translator in Japan, sends back to the Christians of this 
city employing him the testimony, that the task of bringing 
into adequate Japanese the sentences of Paul is far less, than 
that of giving like embodiment to the language and imagery 
of John. There is clearness and simplicity in the terms ; but 
the themes are so deep and so high, that the waters, limpid 
as they seem, become dark by their profundity. John is, as 
the older Christians called him, the Divine, the Saint Theolo- 
gian. It was his province to reveal the more extended and 
confidential discourses of our Lord, while yet in the body. He 
does it in perspicuous elementary terms, but the topics run into 
the bosom of the Infinite Jehovah ; and the trembling seer 
lifts the mantle from over the bosom of the incarnate God, 
and shows the throbbing heart of a love, a wisdom, and a 
justice, all of them divine, and all, therefore, infinite. 



42 J^VUaJ) AXD CUAILlCTi:nS OF IIISTOIiY. 

Ill the purposes of Heaven, again, it seems also unspeakably 
fitting and kindly, that tlic closing lessons of this great apos- 
tle's testimony should be in the shape of prophecy. It is diffi- 
cult, but there is a special blessing to them who read and pon- 
der the difficult pages. Calvin, with his rare skill and power, 
yet shrunk from continuing his commentary so as to include 
the Book of Revelations. But Luther, who did an earlier and 
in some sense a braver work in the German Reformation, 
fetched a part of his arms out of the arsenals of John to as- 
sail the towers and gates of antichrist. And a book which 
has tasked and rewarded the study of minds like the Abbot 
Joachim of Floris, in the Middle Ages ; and Xapier, the in- 
ventor of logarithms, in the days of the British Stuarts ; and 
Brightman, the oracle on this part of Scripture of so many of 
the Puritan fathers of New England ; and Mede, and Sir Isaac 
Newton, and the great Bengel, and E. B. Elliott, in our own 
times, is certainly not undeserving note and devoutest heed. 
Men have calculated rashly, but the results of devout and lowly 
scrutiny have been good. The Church has been taught to 
look upon the future as her home, and to deem herself a child 
of the Day-spring, an heir of the Eternal Hope. She has been 
placed in the attitude of perpetual cheerfulness and vigilant ex- 
pectancy. The old world looked upon death as best imaged 
by the form of an angel with a lowered torch and extinct flame. 
Christ's new world is guarded by the form of an angel of the 
Resurrection and of the re-appearances, his torch uplifted and 
its flame upstreaming, for the " Lord cometh," and the crown 
is for them that await '' his appearing.'' 

It is, again, one of the remarkable peculiarities of this book 
of God's sendino- and holding — none but he to enlarge it, 



THE EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 43 

none but lie to interpret it — that it lays simplest lessons and 
cheer for the day side by side with high promises for the ages 
that have not yet emerged, and the worlds that are to come be- 
yond the Judgment -day. Lessons that befit the mourner in 
the chamber of recent bereavement, and that stay the falling 
tears of some Sunday-school child recently orphaned, lie in 
rich profusion, intermingled with the clews to the later terrene 
and supraraundane experiences of the Zion of God. The lore 
that may exhaust and reward the plodding studies of an aged 
Christian, continued through a lifetime, abuts on the simple 
consolations and admonitions that a child's heart may take up 
and apply. The simplicity of Ilira who took the little nurs- 
lings of Palestine into his arms, and caressed and blessed them, 
is, in this his final utterance, sweetly blended with the majesty 
and clouded profundity of his appeals and warnings, when 
shown as the Lord of the Universe and the occupant of the 
great white throne. He comes, rending graves, and recasting 
worlds, and allotting destinies, but the tear of an elder Brother 
drops on the King's sceptre ; and out of the gates ajar of his 
heavenly home come down snatches of melody, that show how 
earth's pilgrims may soon sit down — glad, jubilant, and safe — 
in the Father's house of many mansions ; " and whosoever will, 
may come and take of the water of life freely." 

You contrast the master of legions and the lowly subject 
whom, it is probable, he had never personally met. You 
heard from his lips the words, " If we say we have not sin- 
ned, we make him" (the God, the Christ) "a liar, and his 
word is not in us;" and then, when you hear the refrain, "If 
any man sin, wc have an advocate with the Father, Jesus 
Christ the righteous, the propitiation for the sins of the 



44 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

world," you turn to the poor Emperor's dying asseveration 
of faultlessness, and wish that he had known this Advocate 
and this Propitiation. You feel that not around the palace, 
though a Titus tenants it, but around the lowly house of that 
fisherman lingers the light of the Mount of Transfiguration — 
" a light never seen on land or on sea," but revealed in the 
book and cross and face and throne of this one Christ — 
the Word, as John proclaimed him — the Maker, Redeemer, 
Sovereign, and Judge of the world. 



MONASTIGISM. 45 



III. 

MONASTICISM. 

For more tban fifteen centuries, with various and flickering 
lustre, has monasticism claimed to be a power in Christendom, 
both in the Greek and Latin branches of the nominal Church. 
AVo suppose the word to describe men and women bound by 
voluntary and life-long vows to seek, apart from the rest of 
the nation and even of the Church, in seclusion and in isola- 
tion from their families, the cultivation of piety in themselves 
and the exercise of a religious influence over society at large. 

Its more intelligent and scholarly friends do not claim that 
it existed in the apostolic age, or that the New Testament 
has laid down laws for the establishment of such devout com- 
munities. The Bible has early taught us to think of vows as 
in certain cases admissible, but has very solemnly cautioned us 
by precept and history against their possible entanglements. 
The vows rashly made by wife and daughter might be can- 
celled by dissent of husband or father. Jephthah is praised 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews as an example of faith; but 
what the extent of the sacrifice he made, upon the vow of de- 
votino* to God the first thino; met on his reachino; his own 
door, is yet matter of debate and most doubtful decision. If 
it involved the actual sacrifice of his child, it was rashly made; 
and the execution of it was even yet more unholy than the 

3 



46 i:bas and characters of history. 

tnaking of it. The forty zealots, who had vowed Paul's death 
before they would themselves take bread or water, were guilty 
of perjury if they did not starve to death ; and if they so 
starved themselves for lack of reaching their victim, they were 
suicides in fact, as in their purpose toward the great Apostle 
of the Gentiles they were murderers in heart. The Christ, 
who meant to bring his honored servant face to face with 
Cajsar, by crossing their ruthless purpose left the band of 
sanguinary ruffians to prove themselves false swearers or self- 
murderers in consequence of that lawless vow. The day — 
that day of final disclosure — will show on which horn of the 
dilemma the fanatics impaled themselves — whether breaking 
their oath or surrendering their lives. Either were crime 
enough. But their story lends no especial encouragement to 
the practice of rash pledges made before God. Every sen- 
tence of every epistle which that holy champion of the faith 
wrote in the years by which he survived those forty days is, 
to each of us its readers in this nineteenth century, a pledge 
how little the Jehovah — before whose eyes as solemnly in- 
voked they thus washed, far as intent could do it, their hands 
in their victim's blood — cared to provide for the maintenance 
of their vow and for its truculent efficacy. They covenanted 
with him to work the murder, but could not thus bribe him 
to become, by his favoring providence, their accomplice in the 
deed. It is a vow nailed on the pillory of Revelation as law- 
less and accursed; yet they, good haters, thought it a relig- 
ious vow that was commendins; their zeal as beinoj like that 
of Jehu against Baal's priests. 

There was a body of religionists known as the Essenes liv- 
ing in the deserts between Palestine and Egypt far back as 



M0NAS3:iCISJI. 47 

Paul's age and earlier. Some Rationalists of modern times 
have wished to find in them the ancestors and teachers of 
John the Baptist and of our Saviour. They lived apart from 
the body of the nation, renouncing marriage, slavery, and war ; 
of austere character, and denouncing the S-adducees for their 
denial of the immortality of the soul. They disappeared from 
history, though both Josephus and Philo name them. It is 
not at all improbable, since peculiar usages and influences seem 
to haunt certain regions through successive generations and 
centuries, that, after the downfall of Jerusalem and the dis- 
persion of the Jewish people from Palestine, this off-lying set- 
tlement left in that whole country memories and traditions, 
out of which, in the close of the third Christian century, 
emerged first the Christian eremite, or solitary hermit, and 
then the embodied monks, who in cloistered communities gave 
themselves, in the renunciation of marriage and secular inter- 
ests, to the cultivation of what they supposed an ascetic piety. 
An Anthony is honored among these earlier recluses, and a Pa- 
chomius. The latter, a converted soldier, who died a.d. 348, 
is said to have left in the Egyptian Thebaid at his death no 
less than five thousand cenobites, or recluses, who regarded 
him as their head. A Simeon Stylites, on the other hand, a 
solitary, who ended his career little more than a century later, 
in A.D. 459, passed thirty-six years of his life on the summit 
of a column, increasing gradually its height. The last of these 
columns and the highest, being some sixty feet tall, he occu- 
pied for the last twenty years of his life. Anthony, in his 
far earlier career, had been assailed with all forms of evil and 
Satanic solicitation. So Simeon of the Column — for his exal- 
tation gave him fame and drew round him admiring crowds — 



48 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

is said to have been solicited by Satan to step off into a char- 
iot, that, as the adversary said, would bear him heavenward. 
When the self -tormenting anchorite was lifting one foot to 
leave his pillar and mount his chariot, the foot so outstretched 
was sprained in punishment of his self-confident fancy. Rec- 
ognizing the delusion, and escaping the deadly fall which Sa- 
tan had thus prepared him, he withdrew his foot and remained 
safe. On that column he was found dead at last. The Ro- 
man Catholic Church observes yet his festival on the 5th of 
January. 

The practices and the honors of hermit and monastical life 
spread. It brought distinction, and to some also ease and 
comparative escape, in the wilderness, from the terrors of 
heathen persecution. But the most honored of these recluses 
were not always free from heresy. Disorders sprung up 
among the smaller bodies and spread among some who adopted 
a roving life. It seemed expedient to gather them into settled 
societies, and to institute over them the authority of abbots, 
whose power needed to be sustained by closer restraints and 
heavier penalties upon the communities whom they ruled. In 
the fourth century appeared similar assemblies for women — 
apart also from their families — nuns under the abbess. 

As the communities augmented their powers and their pos- 
sessions, and spread into the AVest from the East, where they 
had begun, they became distinguished by various peculiarities 
of severer or less austere discipline. Fasting and maceration 
of various kinds attracted regard, and brought increased in- 
fluence and reverence. Simeon of the Pillar, for instance, is 
said to have taken but one meal a week, and during all the 
season of Lent to have foregone food entirely. When the 



MONASTICISM. 49 

apostle liad warned, in Lis first letter to Timothy, of the peril- 
ous times when men should give heed to seducing spirits " for- 
bidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats," 
while some heeded it as a prophetic intimation against the 
current infatuation, others contrived to parry the allusion, as 
not meant for austerities so difficult to nature, and so wondrous 
in the eyes of the masses. 

Nor can we believe that there were not many true and ear- 
nest Christians among the bodies so associating and expanding 
themselves. Basil was for some time at the head of a monas- 
tery, and Chrysostom was for a time in the mountains of Syria 
an anchorite ; though each, after a time, exchanged the recluse 
life for the more active and public services of a bishop. The 
distinction soon became fixed between the clergy and prelates 
who officiated in outer life, and were called seculars, and the 
men drawn into the monastery and hermitage, and who were 
regarded as regular clergy from living under the fixed, rigid 
rule of the monastic establishment. And again the great body 
of the monks and nuns were but inferior members of a com- 
munity under the supervision and irresponsible control of their 
superior officers. Associated with these were respectively lay- 
brethren and lay-sisters, also partaking in the enclosure ; but 
the powers set over them were confessors, priors, and abbots 
or abbesses. 

The devotion of some, and the alarms of others, on their 
death-beds, out of the great mass of nominal Christians, induc- 
ing on their part large gifts to these stricter, severer confess- 
ors, rapidly enhanced the treasures and enlarged the territorial 
domains of some of these establishments. As the aires rolled 
on, and the Roman Empire went into severance, and ultimately 



50 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY, 

toward dissolution as following dismemberment, some of the 
monasteries established became missionary outposts, and sent 
forth fearless and fervent laborers for the diffusion of the 
Christian faith. That faith was mixed, indeed, with continually 
augmented increments of tradition and superstition, an alloy 
often greatly obscuring the truth as first delivered. AVhat the 
monks of Bangor did in Britain, and the Culdees of the Scot- 
tish isles, and the Anglo-Saxon saints for the evangelization 
of heathen Germany, for the preservation and the dissemina- 
tion of the Gospel, the candid student of ecclesiastical history 
would neither forget nor belittle. 

But the power given to the bishops of the secular clergy, 
and to the abbots and priors of the monastic votaries, went 
on rapidly floating them upward into the rank of, and into 
rivalry with, the rulers of provinces and the high civil m'agis- 
trates. And with augmented revenues came, in too many cases, 
but increased luxury, pride, and ostentation, and in their train 
oppression and in some cases profligacy. 

There were in the Middle Ages men like Benedict and like 
Bernard, of whom Luther is recorded, in that most quaint and 
pungent book, his " Table-talk," as saying : " St. Bernard was 
the best monk that ever was, whom I love beyond all the rest 
put together ; yet he dared to say it were a sign of damnation if 
a man quitted his monastery ;"* and of him Gibbon, too, speaks 
in admiration, wondering at the rare self-denial which enabled 
Bernard to walk beside the glorious Lake of Geneva, on whoso 
shores centuries after Gibbon himself lived, without raising his 
eyes to gaze on its enchanting scenery, an act of voluntary 

* Hazlitt, "Luther's Table-talk," p. 215. 



MONASTICISM. 51 

self-abnegation for wliich we must judge the New Testament 
gives us no warrant, and which had it been enjoined by true 
piety would have required David also, to have abstained from 
gazing entranced on the glories of the heavens that some of 
his Psalms so pathetically extol. 

In later times, as the older and wealthier orders became com- 
paratively absorbed by the care of their revenues, and the ex- 
ercise of their great territorial and political influence, new bod- 
ies were constituted — some the mendicant orders professing to 
live on alms. The Franciscans and their founder, St. Francis 
of Assisi, showed an intense zeal, and as preachers wielded for 
their earlier years vast popular influence. Another great preach- 
ing order was the Dominican, whose founder, St. Dommic, was, 
in his zeal against heresy, permitted to establisli the Inquisition 
that for so many centuries lorded it over Spain and Portugal, 
not unknown in Italy, but dreaded and checked in France. 
Under Torquemada its power was great, and was fearfully felt. 
Before the terrible crusade it wielded against the Albigenscs, 
in Beziers in 1209, sixty thousand were massacred, and Catho- 
lics among them ; the zealot at the head commanding that the 
believers and the heretics should go to death indiscriminately, 
for God was able to select out of the dead his own. 

In still later days the Papal Church founded orders like the 
Jesuits, in part monastic but in other respects more secular, 
exempt from many of the old cloister restrictions, to give them 
scope and margin for the exercise of their influence as edu- 
cators, as converters of the heathen, and as antagonists of the 
nascent and widely prevalent Reformation. Receiving a mili- 
tary organization from their founder, Ignatius Loyola, they 
vowed an entire surrender of conscience and soul to their head, 



52 ERAS AND CHAliACTERS OF HISTORY. 

called, in the phrase of the camp, their *' general," who made 
the body one vast engine informed, by one will, and shedding 
ont their unparalleled energies as under their captain-gen er- 
aFs single brain and will and conscience. Lord Bacon envied 
them in their first college successes for their shill as teachers, 
but in this respect their later have not equalled their former 
days. Their missions in the Old World and the New were 
many of them managed with a chivalrous devotedness; but 
others of them with a subtilty of character and a duplicity of 
utterance more machiavellian than apostolic. And, as if by 
the sentence of divine retribution, their triumphs have been 
evermore but evanescent, and interrupted often by the most 
sudden and disastrous reverses. Their collision with Jansenism 
brought upon them, in the "Provincial Letters" of Pascal, and 
in the merciless dissection of their morality by Anthony Ar- 
nauld and others his fellows, exposures and infamy from the 
effect of which they can never recover themselves. 

The sisterhoods of Catholic Europe and America have, again, 
been new expansions of the monastic principle applied to outer 
works of benevolence and education, which have won them 
wide favor, reverence, and love. 

And the zealous Protestant — dreading and deprecating the 
character of the errors they have aided to spread as to the true 
nature and province of Christian piety ; reviewing the terrible 
record which some of these monastic orders have made in in- 
stigating or in sharing or in palliating massacres like that of 
St. Bartholomew's Day in France, and of Ireland, and of the 
Waldenses; looking into the complaints of governments and 
of fellow-Catholics against some monasteries; reading the ter- 
rible satire of Keuchlin and Hutten in the " Epistolae Obscuro- 



MONASTICISM. 53 

rum Virorum," portraying with a coarse brusb, but with a ter- 
rible force of humor and indignation, the awkwardness, brutal- 
ity, and stolidity of some members of the monastic orders — 
cannot believe that their extension is to be regarded with other 
than disfavor, strong and immitigable. " Be they as they are, 
or let them be no more," said the head of the Jesuit order 
when changes were proposed before their abolition by the Pon- 
tiff Ganganelli, Clement XIV. That abolition has been re- 
tracted ; the order has been re-established. But human nature 
being what it is, and the unity and infallibility of the Sovereign 
Pontiff being each century keyed up to a higher point of as- 
sertion and imputed right to reign, the great principle, not for 
Jesuitism alone, but for all the varied ramifications of monas- 
ticism, seems to be, as Ricci pronounced for his own Jesuit 
order, " Be as they were, or they cannot be." 

'We would not forget that out of a monastery came the 
"Imitation of Christ," as it is called, a volume of disputed au- 
thorship ascribed more generally to Thomas a Kempis, though 
others make it the work of Gerson ; out of a monastery came 
the great Judgment hymn, the "Dies Ira3," of Thomas de 
Celano ; out of a modern monastery the hymns of Frederick 
W. Faber, many of them so beautiful and devout, as out of 
earlier associations of the same class came so many Latin 
hymns of high, solemn beauty. We would not lose sight of 
Port Royal, thoiigh Rome denounced it, and Jesuitism by its 
use of a Bourbon sovereig-n demolished its structure and scat- 
tered the inmates. Sullen and narrow must be the heart that 
turns not reverently and lovingly to Angelique Arnauld, and 
Jacqueline Pascal, and others of those holy sisters. We would 
not forget the services of a Tillemont, the Jansenist, to Church 

3* 



54 EM AS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. 

history and pagan liistoiy, -whose compilations, so exact and 
honest, extorted the praise as they aided the studies of the in- 
fidel Gibbon. We would not forget the Scripture version of 
a De Saci, or the comments on the New Testament of a Ques- 
nel. We would not forget the labors for patristic lore of the 
great Benedictine scholars, the folios, some sixty or more, in 
which the Bollandist Jesuit fathers of Belgium poured out 
such accumulation of legend, history, and tradition over the 
ages that have gone. We would not forget the erudition of a 
Petavius, and of a Baronius, and of a Calmet, whom Voltaire 
visited and flattered, and contrived slyly the while to use the 
knowledge extorted from his host to buttress his own sceptical 
cavils and mockeries. We would not forget the missionary 
toils of a Xavier, though their effects we suppose to have been 
greatly exaggerated, and in later times the efforts of a Jesuit 
father, Beschi, whose Tamil works, some of them, even Prot- 
estant missionaries now reprint and employ. AVe would not, 
in times nearer our own, overlook the powers and achievements 
of Lamennais, hailed for a time by a gratified Roman Catholic 
people as the last of the great fathers of the Church, though 
ultimately going over from the Church and faith he defended 
to negation and scepticism, and leaving behind him disciples 
that lamented their master but would not accompany him, like 
Montalembert and Lacordaire. 

But, against all these admissions, we set the fact that for 
Scripture verity, for national freedom, and for social order 
these monastic bodies have not accomplished what the less 
showy but more searching, and, we must hold it with the Bible 
open before us, the more spiritual labors of Protestant churches 
have accomplished for the well-being of the household, for the 



M0NASTICIS3L 55 

cause of political enfranchisement, for the extinction of slavery, 
and for the removal of paganism. See their old Congo mis- 
sions, what are they now ? See their old Paraguay missions, 
what are they now ? Marshall, a convert from Protestantism, 
has drawn a disparaging comparison of the Protestant and the 
Roman Catholic laborers in the far field of missions. We 
must judge that, to a patient and thorough and dispassionate 
scrutiny, the results are just the opposite of what Marshall 
would represent them. 

On the standard of the Bible, and as ascertained by the 
Bible's statement of the fruits of the Gospel on the race as re- 
ceiving and obeying it, it seems to us that the system of exclu- 
sion from the world, of separation between the laic piety and 
the ecclesiastical religion which monasticism has cherished, is 
evidence against its being a plant of the Master's setting. 

See again, in the cause of political freedom, how little the 
monastic principle has given of aid, and how much it has inter- 
posed of hinderance and restriction. Its mitred leaders have 
been too often tyrannical, vindictive, and utterly unscrupulous. 
See the language in which Pontiffs' bulls have sometimes de- 
nounced the monasteries of a Roman Catholic land. Remem- 
ber the Clements, and the Ravaillacs, and the Garnets who have 
ministered or quietly aided assassination and conspiracy. 

Take, in days not so far removed from modern times — at 
the going out of the fifteenth century — a French ecclesiastic, 
William d'Estouteville, who died in 1483 at Rome, at the age 
of eighty. It was the year of Luther's birth, D'Estouteville's 
death- year. At this very time Columbus, sick of heart, was 
seeking vainly opportunity to make his exploration of West- 
ern seas, and not until nine years afterward turned his prow 



56 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

toward our continent. That D'Estouteville was not without 
honor and confidence at the centre of the Roman Church 
appears from his dying as the dean or head of the College 
of Cardinals. He was, in France, Archbishop of Rouen, and 
had beside this six other bishops' sees in France and Italy. 
He had also, as head of monastic establishments, in addition 
to these episcopal and archiepiscopal mitres, four posts as 
abbot and three places as grand prior. He was of the Ben- 
edictines, one of the best of the monastic orders. He was, 
besides, chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church. In 1452 
the Roman Court and See had used him as legate. He reg- 
ulated at one time the University of Paris. His revenues were 
vast, but it is said he used them in decorating churches, and 
in relieving the poor. So prompt and stern was he, however, 
in asserting ecclesiastical rights, though thus violating canon 
laws in the number of his own rich pluralities, that when a 
civil officer,, having in his hands the warrant for an execution, 
had compelled a poor priest to act as the executioner, this 
William d'Estoutcville, abbot of four monasteries, grand prior 
of three, bishop of six sees, and archbishop of another, though 
canon law forbids ecclesiastics to shed blood — he, to avenge 
the insult done to the priest, caused the civil officer who had 
thus turned priest into hangman to be hung, this civil offend- 
er, from the archbishop's own window. Now, when a man so 
high in position and favor at the Holy Court itself, intrusted 
with important embassies between his native France and the 
Roman Court, had, with all this clustering mass of monastic 
honors upon his single head, leisure thus to turn executioner, 
was the monastic system that he represented one that Paul 
would have commended to the admiration of Timothy ? AVas 



MONASTIGISM. 51 

it in the temper of Paiil's Master? D'Estouteville was a 
growth of that great excrescence on the New Testament sys- 
tem which assumed to conserve and to isolate and to inten- 
sify the sanctity of Christian men and especially of Christian 
priests. "By their fruits shall ye know them." 

What are the great lessons that emerge from this history 
of man's fervid activity in the form of new and powerful 
communities, essaying under close and life-long vows to give 
Christianity a deeper hold on the hearts of the race? They 
are to us simply two. The first of the lessons seems but this, 
that man is not safe in undertaking to amend the methods of 
God. The second, a great elementary truth, but needing to be 
perpetually recalled to the memory of the churches, is like to 
the first : it is that there is no wisdom in slighting the hints 
of Christ. Out of the cell, and from the pillow wet with 
tears, and from hair-shirt and scourge crusted with blood, 
from abbeys and monastic libraries and confessionals, from 
the rack, dungeons, and autos-da-fe of the Inquisition, from the 
path of the crusader, from the royal council chambers where 
Jesuits hold the conscience of sovereigns and shape the policy 
of empires, as from the Indian hut where they train the sav- 
age neophyte patiently won to the use of rosary and chrism, 
from bells, from processions, from litanies comes back distinct 
and sweet the old unspent rule : Respect Jehovah's methods ; 
heed the hints of the incarnate Emmanuel. Moses virtually 
proclaimed it, when long centuries before the advent he bade 
that the Israel of Ood " hear the prophet " like unto him — 
Moses — whom God should yet send. It was uttered under yet 
more solemn accompaniments when, on the Mount of Trans- 
figuration, the apostles heard from the Father's own voice the 



58 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

charge, " This is iny beloved Son, hear ye him ;" and Moses 
and Elias swept past, but Christ stayed behind. The leader 
of the Exodus in the arrangement of the Tabernacle, and after 
him David and Solomon in the structure of the Temple, were 
to follow the pattern shown by the Infallible Architect. And 
when a new dispensation took the place of the old, its Founder 
bade his apostles expect that his Spirit should bring to re- 
membrance all that he had taught them as to that spiritual 
temple, his own Church, which, based on himself, his work, 
liis truth, and his grace, and which as informed by his Spirit 
was to inherit the wide earth, and against which, though hell 
should be permitted to exert its craft and to expend its rage, 
the gates of hell should never prevail in the ultimate result. 
As the Alpha, Christ w^as never to be anticipated ; as the 
Omega, he is as little to be abrogated or superseded. 

Now, when God placed our race upon the earth, whicli had 
been furnished and ordered for their habitation and culture, 
he set man in families. He made the household earlier than 
all human governments, laws, and institutions. Woman, as 
man's friend, companion, and helper, occupied the Eden when 
its green alleys were as yet unforfeited. The Fall, that wrench- 
ed them apart by their dread temerity from their old relations 
of loyalty and favor with their Maker, did not, terrible as were 
its other moral divulsions, break up the household compact. 
Under the shadow of the curse exiling them from Eden, Eve 
moved forth upon the outer lands, sad, yet loving, the one wife 
of our first father, and the one mother of our race. Polygamy 
and all forms of license, violence, and wrong made their terrible 
innovations upon the primeval arrangement, but the original 
method of God retained singly its rightfulness ; not to be war- 



MONASTICISM. 59 

rantably replaced by any improvements as man deemed, or as 
Satan prompted them. With their distinct traits of character 
the sexes resembled eacli the other; but each had its peculiar 
province and adaptation. For man, the outer field and the axe 
and plough for its tillage ; for woman, the roof-tree and the 
hearth. With her beauty and grace, her keen and readier per- 
ceptions, her warm affection : to her, God expressly assigned 
the charge of the cradle, and the nurturing, fostering guardian- 
ship of the death-bed. To man, with his more rugged strength, 
his larger enterprise, and his more prolonged and deliberate 
judgment, the common Father on high assigned the provision 
for the household needs and the defence of the home from 
outer aggression. The infant, for whom both cared, toiled, and 
prayed, was to bear their name, influence, and hopes into the 
generation which should act when they had gone down into 
the grave. Lax divorce, and concubinage, and riot, and false 
reliofion broke down the old institutions, but the chanores were 
not improvements. Christ's harbinger was to turn the hearts 
of fathers to children and of children to fathers, renewing and 
deepening the old channels of human society. Our Lord him- 
self, when illustrating the indispensable need of family concord, 
said that Satan's empire even must go down, without some 
principle of the kind. " A house divided against itself cannot 
stand." And Satan at feud with Satan would explode even the 
empire of Beelzebub. 

But it is a singular fact in the annals of human inventive- 
ness and presumptuousness, that philosophers, and sovereigns, 
and men of fashion, and founders of new Utopias, and coiners 
of new religions, have fretted against this old method of God's 
devising and commending — the single and life-long union form- 



60 ^72^/S AND CHARACTEmS OF HISTORY. 

ed by free and wise affection between husband and wife — God's 
putting together, which denied and practically defied man's 
right — a right, however, perpetually and most petulantly claimed 
— man's right of putting asunder. Plato's imaginary Republic 
ignored this old rule and method of the Maker and Parent. 
So, in Mohammed's new revelation and law for the nations, the 
harem, with its discord, bondage, and debasement, took the place 
of the household of Eden. And so, in the communities of the 
Socialist, in the schemes of Fourier, and St. Simon, and Cabet, 
the Icarian iramio-rant to our own shores, in the arrangements 
of Shakers, and all the crudities and atrocities of the Mormons, 
how eager and frantic and obstinate have been the endeavors 
to amend the methods of God, and make over the household 
at the bidding of caprice, and with what hideous results, orgies, 
and slaughter ! 

Now, as to the Christian Church it seemed unaccountable, 
and yet at the close of the third century men began to think 
that holiness was attainable by the disruption of family bonds. 
First, the hermit, dwelling lonely and apart ; then came the 
monk, herded with his fellow - celibates, but the ties of house- 
hold life forsworn in the interests of Christian sanctity by the 
entire community in their monastery. Then women, in abjur- 
ing the old duties of the daughter, the sister, the wife, and the 
mother, formed their nunneries. Did it for either sex brino* in 
a grade of sanctity and a measure of Christian consistency and 
usefulness, as upon the outlying and pagan world, that made 
the new method a betterment upon the Christian household, 
as Timothy had found it in the nurturing care of his mother, 
Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois ; as Paul had known it in the 
hospitable and Christian home of Aq^uila and Priscilla ; as John 



MONASTICISM. 61 

had seen it -wlien tlic mother of our Lord became in her wid- 
owhood the inmate of his home ; or as Peter when his wife's 
mother, healed by the Saviour -guest, rose to minister to the 
apostle troop and their divine Master ? No ; history is one pro- 
longed and emphatic attestation, that the disruption of the 
household was not the enhancement but the debasement of the 
early Christian Church. The scandals, the rivalries, the grow- 
ing heresies, and the waning of Christian graces, and the incur- 
sions of pagan contamination and corruption, left the Church 
spiritually poorer, the world less susceptible of true evangeliza- 
tion and less patient of the pure word of Scripture, as the sa- 
cred monastery looked out of countenance the old Christian 
household. 

There are improvements to be made by man's scrutiny and 
invention in the outer processes of material nature. But man's 
limits are narrower than he sometimes deems them. The Flat- 
head Indian, as his mother carefully shapes and cases him, re- 
ceives a wedge-like skull in place of that with which the God 
of nature framed the infant. Is this new roof, or the brain 
sheltered under its penthouse, more beautiful or more brill- 
iant than the original skull and brain as the palm of Jehovah 
shaped both? The aristocratic daughters of China have for 
many centuries bestowed effort and endured pain, to convert 
into a mere knob the foot God gave them, and look down 
upon the maid and wife of their country worker, not so crib- 
bed and remodelled, as essentially and indisputably low-bred, 
vulgar, and unfashionable, for the free step and full - grown 
foot which mark them. So the mandarin of the same Celes- 
tial Empire cherishes the growth of finger-nails, preserved in 
cases from harm or retrenchment, as a proof of noble rank. 



62 ERAS AND CRAJRACTERS OF HISTORY. 

When the proud King of Chaldea recovered from his madness, 
his re-asserting reason readily consented to the retrenchment 
of tresses that had grown long as eagles' plumes, and nails that 
had stretched out to be like birds' claws. According to Chi- 
nese fashion, each added inch to the length of his finger-tal- 
ons, instead of auguring madness, proved rank and growth of 
dignity. 

And the Socialism, however it sheltered itself under names 
of progress and science and freedom, is in the State but like 
the old monasticism in the Church, essaying to amend the 
handiwork of God. To get rid of the household is not to 
make man better, wiser, or happier. It is the Flat-head In- 
dian's improvement of forehead and skull, and the Chinese 
lady's betterment of ankle and instep. God's work was more 
beauteous and safe and useful before such rash intermeddling. 
Does modern license, in the interests of what it calls liberty, 
claim the release of the old bonds, and proclaim it a return to 
the simplicity of nature? Take the South Sea Islands, where 
similar shamelessness and heartlessness had ruled, and is the 
result peace, reverence, or strength ? No ; it is for a race what 
Nebuchadnezzar's descent from the throne to the forest was 
for the individual — the prince driven to herd with the beasts ; 
the being with immortality, and conscience, and the glimpse 
of the Judgment-seat, and the possibilities of heaven, bidden 
to forego and to forget them all, and grovel where the ox 
browses and the adder glides, uncombed, unclothed, unwashed, 
lower than the beasts, because he is by his own act and choice 
an embruted man, and from the rank of one, and the charge 
and kinsmanship of angels, he flings himself, far as he can ef- 
fect it, to herd with the satyr, and be lower than the brute in 



MONASTICISM. G3 

the degradation that inevitably follows from the height of the 
elevation from which he has causelessly plunged. 

We said that the story of these efforts to procure, by new 
and human modes, an enhancement of the hopes and powers 
of the Christian Church, was suggestive of another lesson. It 
is that there is no wisdom in our slighting Christ's hints. It 
was said by an admiring scholar of later times, with regard 
to one of the great theologians of the English Established 
Church, that the very dust and filings of Pearson were gold ; 
in other words, that his lighter utterances and lesser tractates 
breathed a power of thought and showed a fulness of scholar- 
ship that made them eminently worthy of study. AYithout 
disputing the justice of this commendation of that distinguish- 
ed divine, it is a thought in which every Christian believer 
will unite fully and emphatically, that our blessed Lord is well 
worth heeding in those expressions of his that seem uttered 
but by-the-way, and in reference to perils that were compara- 
tively vague and remote at the time when he first spoke. Be- 
fore his own removal, and long in advance of the time of the 
universal diffusion of his Gospel, he bade his followers be- 
ware of the false Christs, and of those who should come with 
" great signs and wonders," so plausible that, " were it possi- 
ble," the elect would be deceived.* And how grave was the 
intimation that amid such significant alarms dropped the cau- 
tion, " Wherefore if they shall say unto yon, Behold, he is in 
the desert ; go not forth : behold, he is in the secret cham- 
bers ; believe it not."f The hermit, who was the precursor of 
the monk, took his name from the desert. He was, in the 

* Matt. xxiv. 24. f Ihid. 26. 



64 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

old Englisli, as in the old Greek, an "eremite," a man of the 
desert. 

Who is there, weary of the world's bewildering tnmults and 
dazing pageants, who has not at times honestly yearned for 
the poet's refuge — 

" Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, 
Some boundless contiguity of shade ?" 

Thus may we blur for a time the din, and cloud for a season 
the glare, that are so treacherous and so irksome. Nor did the 
great Master himself peremptorily forbid an occasional resort 
thither. lie himself was before sending out his apostles all 
night in prayer on a mountain ; and at another time he himself 
led the apostles to a desert place to rest awhile. But to culti- 
vate habitually and for the lifetime an uninhabited solitude 
was not his rule for others or his wont for his own ministry. 
In the wilderness the Spirit had led him to be with beasts and 
" to be tempted of the devil." The very story of our Exem- 
plar shows how even he, the sinless, in whom Satan had no 
foothold, no vested right, yet in lonely hours encountered the 
sorest and closest besetment from his and our unseen foes. 
He was, however, to go up and down preaching everywhere, in 
village and synagogue, and on hill-side, and in Temple portico, 
the Gospel of the Kingdom ; and as to his emissaries, when 
he had achieved his earthly work and laid the basis of the 
apostolic message, he bade them carry that message with an 
earth-broad commission into all nations, seeking out the speak- 
ers of the many tongues heard on Pentecost, into every mart 
and province where each such tongue was the home ver- 
nacular. The candle was not for the bushel, as its lair and 



3WNASTICIS2L ■ 65 

guardian, but for the candlesticlv, shooting its beams over all 
the house. 

So, as to devotion, he taught the necessity of retirement at 
frequent seasons from kindred and church associates into the 
lonely closet, with its door shut upon the isolated occupant. 
But the closet was not the perpetual and exclusive abode of 
the disciple, more than the pantry and kitchen are to be the 
sole life-thought of the householder. The strength gained by 
occasional resort to the one place is to spread its healthful ac- 
tivity over every acre of the outer fields, and amid the chaffer- 
ings of the market and the throngs of the noisy metropolis. 
When, then, the herald of the false Christ said, "Behold he — 
the long-looked-for Christ — behold he is in the secret cham- 
bers," the teacher dropped the brief warning, heavy and hot, 
brief and stern, as the thunder-bolt of the dooming-day : " Be- 
lieve it not." Discredit utterly all such false locations of the 
disciple's duty — all such unwarranted defiances of the Master's 
anticipatory disclosures. 

Well had it been for the Christians of the tliird and all 
succeeding centuries had they, in the light of our Redeemer's 
pregnant hints, thought it wise to be incredulous and unbe- 
lieving as to these endeavors to surprise the Jesus of the old 
world-wide Gospel into a furtive tenancy of the mysterious and 
silent inner chambers, where drowsy litany was intoned but 
by a select few to an immured community, where one entire 
sex was with jealousy excluded ; and the Church, despairing of 
the salvation of the nation, was to offer its iteration of orisons 
for the conservation of the order, and the security of the little 
band of the faithful. Why, even in the catacombs, where the 
early Christians, with numbers but lately decimated by the 



66 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

beasts of the amphitheatre, met for prayer, their intercessions 
went up for the conversion of the Caesar who had murdered 
their brethren — went up as under his very feet, and out of the 
gloom and the cave rose also the hymn to the Christ himself, 
the crucified, w^ho was yet to rule the nations now ferociously 
pagan. As the divine sufferer had on the cross prayed for 
his murderers, so these his disciples had then and there com- 
passion and hope and intercossion for the praetors w-ho had set 
the informers on their own track, and whose officers might be 
at the instant revealed out of the dark galleries to seize these 
worshippers as fresh victims. The roots of a divine life took 
hold on the world as their appointed field. The Joseph plant- 
ed as a fruitful vine had his branches hurt by the archers when 
those offshoots of the vine ran over the wall — the wall of iso- 
lation, the wall of estrangement. But, as the prophet father 
Jacob foretold, if Midianite merchants and Egyptian masters, 
and truculent, fratricidal brethren all pointed the array of their 
archery against this fruitful plant, its root was in the well 
of the divine faithfulness and omnipotence and truthfulness. 
The assailed, like his archer pursuers, had his defence ; and the 
bow of the assailed abode in strength, being made strong by 
the mighty God of Jacob. Publicity was, in one sense, the 
light and life-blood and the preservative principle of the Church, 
assailed, maligned, and martyred. To forsake this, and to 
choose the secret chamber, whether abbot prescribed it as the 
law of safety and peace for the brother monks, or the mystic 
preached it as the one condition of a true communion with 
God, had, as we have said, all one reply, cogent and clear in 
the hint of the far-seeing and all-wielding Redeemer — "Be- 
lieve it not." 



MONASTICISM. 67 

Jonah evaded the irksome and thankless mission for pagan 
Nineveh, and found himself in the maw of the sea-monster. 
Elijah wished for death, when hunted with the murderous 
threats of the fierce Jezebel, mad for loss of her false prophets. 
But the angel, with sad, kind chidiugs, sends the disheartened 
prophet to meet in Iloreb, Mount of God, as Moses long cen- 
turies before had found it, the searching inquiry of the God of 
Moses and Elijah : " What doest thou here, Elijah V 

And so the Christ in the first century had sent on his new 
Elijahs, of this greater dispensation, to confront a Sanhedrim 
in Jerusalem and an Emperor in Rome. And be this Emperor 
Nero " of the Copper-beard," whom Paul faced, or the Domitian, 
false and heartless brother of Titus, the " Bald-headed Nero," 
as his subjects nicknamed him, whom John faced some thirty 
years after Paul's occultation by the earlier Caesar, the Master 
promised both, for the encounter, a mouth and wisdom which 
all their adversaries could not gainsay or resist. 

The Christian student turning wistfully the pages of this 
blessed volume fails to find on any page of any book in the 
record the first intimation that the word of this Christ, or one 
jot or one tittle of that word, has lost, by lapse of years and 
growth of human science, its earlier validity and intrinsic reality. 
He finds no trace of any indication the most remote that the 
Lord, Creator of the ends of the earth, " fainteth, and is weary." 
There is no wisdom in slighting the hints, of just the opposite 
tenor, which this the Messiah has given, that the seclusion of 
solitary and monastic worshippers is not the plan of the cam- 
paign, for the subdual of the world to the obedience of the 
faith, as that plan has been sketched by the great Captain of 
our Salvation with a full foresight on his part of all the needs 



68 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of the centuries, and a perfect readiness in his grace to supple- 
ment, out of his own all-sufficiency, their deficiencies, if lowli- 
ness confess them, and if faith urge them. "The little flock" 
is not to cower, bleat, and hide ; but is charged, on the con- 
trary, to "fear not," for the Christ (is not in the future to 
vanquish, but has in the past) — has overcome the world. Mo- 
nasticism proposes to amend God's methods by splitting np the 
family, to purify the Church and perfect it, and slight Christ's 
hints by dodging the world which the Emmanuel proclaims 
himself as " overcoming." 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYS0ST02L 69 



IV. 

AUGUSTINE AND CHRY808T0M. 

It was once said by Luther, in allusion to the Exodus of 
Israel at the time when the tribes were crossing the Red Sea : 
" The rod of Moses was worth more than a thousand spears of 
Pharaoh." The truth of that was soon felt in every rank of 
the Egyptian host, and in every crashing axle and rending 
wheel of all their many chariots. Behind that simple rod, 
waved in the prophet's hand, was the potent benediction. The 
staff upraised bared the ocean-bed, and, waved again, it brought 
back the returning waters, and strategy and valor went down 
before it into inevitable defeat and wide-weltering ruin. 

Speaking of another instrumentality of God's, equally in- 
significant in man's eyes with this staff of Moses, an instru- 
mentality used for the later emergencies of God's people, an 
apostle has said : " It has pleased God, by the foolishness of 
preaching, to save them that believe."* Faith, the channel of 
the saving ; the cross of redemption, the secret of salvation ; 
and preaching, the instrument by which men were taught to 
exercise that faith, and trust that cross, and inherit that sal- 
vation. But preaching was itself disparaged ; rated by the 
world's sages as foolishness and resisted by the princes of the 

* 1 Corinthians i. 21. 
4 



70 ERAS AND CHABACTEKS OF HISTORY. 

nations as preposterous treason against Cresar, and as silly 
blasphemy against Caesar's old hereditary gods. 

The world's Redeemer and Judge sent out his apostles to 
preach everywhere. Their proclamation of the Word, as 
Christ's heralds, was the rod which they were to wield. Stand- 
ing, as the Christian pulpit did, in place of revenues and armies 
and fleets and schools and libraries and tribunals, the world 
hooted long and loudly at so utterly senseless an instrument, 
addressing itself to so vast an enterprise as the conversion of 
the nations. 

But look at results, and the world's mockery may well be 
hushed. Let us select two great preachers of this Gospel, born 
in the fourth and dying in the fifth Christian century — the 
one the most renowned of the preachers of the Latin, and the 
other of the Greek branch of Christendom — and let us dwell on 
their influence, not only as exercised on their contemporaries, 
but as wielded, after the lapse of more than fourteen centuries, 
over the Christians of our own times widely scattered over 
the round globe. 

Under Constantino the Great the Christian faith had received 
not only toleration but a public recognition. But the Gospel 
had already, in too many cases, in order to render its reception 
easier, become intermingled with errors and usages that were 
heathen in origin, and whose presence in the nominal Church 
weakened and perverted it. Many evils were left, for the sake 
of precipitating an external conformity, not merely uncorrected, 
but to a certain degree sheltered under new and holy names. 
A religion thus organized needed sore trials for its defecation 
and recovery. And soon after the nominal adoption of the 
new faith by the old Roman Empire, the hostile influences 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYiSOSTOM. Yl 

appeared ^Yllich were commissioned by Divine Providence to 
punish what would not be corrected. 

Tlie true date of Chrysostom's birth is yet matter of some 
uncertainty. Some make it the year 347, others 345, or even 
344 A.D. As Constantino the Great died in 337, these vari- 
ous dates would represent him (Chrysostom) as born seven or 
eight or, at most, ten years after that Emperor's death. He 
saw the light of this world in Antioch, then one of the four 
great cities of the empire, and a metropolis of some two hun- 
dred thousand inhabitants. Augustine, born in 354, was, by 
some seven or nine or ten years, the junior of Chrysostom ; 
and when his cradle was first rocked in the Numidian city Ta- 
gasta, on the North African coast, Constantino the Great had 
been some seventeen years in his grave. These two young 
worthies, Antiochian and African, were long contemporaries; 
but the Greek completed his career when somewhere between 
sixty and sixty-three years of age, in the year 407 a.d. The 
greater Latin father lived seventy-six years, and survived his 
great contemporary of Constantinople, Chrysostom, some twen- 
ty-three years, dying at Hippo in 430 a.d. 

During their earlier years Julian the Apostate made his en- 
deavor to re-instate paganism, but died, thirty-two years old, 
in 363 A.D., when Chrysostom was (according to these various 
estimates of his birth-year) a lad of some sixteen to nineteen 
years of age, and when the young Augustine was but a boy 
of nine years. In the year before his own death Julian, with 
malign intent to write a practical refutation and contradiction 
upon Christ's prediction of the irretrievable overthrow of Je- 
rusalem, had given the Jews permission and help to rebuild 
their fane and city. This was in 362, Augustine then a boy 



72 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of some eiglit years of age, and Cbrysostom's age from fifteen 
to eigliteen. The miraculous interruption of the endeavor un- 
der Julian for the restoration of the Hebrew Temple has been 
questioned, but AVarburton's arguments for its historical truth 
we hold unanswered and unanswerable. 

Philosophy had yet among the learned heathen its able and 
eaofer advocates. Libanius, the friend of Julian and the in- 
structor of Chrysostom, was one of these ; as an orator and 
scholar, of high distinction, and in his adhesion to heathen- 
ism fixed and zealous. The churches had their heresies and 
controversies, their schisms and their scandals. The outlying 
provinces of the great Roman Empire had, many of them, 
their old idolatries but imperfectly reached by the zeal of 
Christian missionaries. Paganism in its many forms, — and Ju- 
daism, fierce amid its losses and exiles, and disappointments, — 
and Philosophies, some wildly fanciful, and others coarsely 
materialistic, were yet all, in various portions of the nominal 
empire, presenting themselves to counteract the faith of the 
Nazarene. Gibbon has undertaken to write the history of the 
empire in its decline and fall, with what seems a covert pur- 
pose to trace that declension and ultimate ruin of the imperial 
power, to the influence, in part, of Christianity. Others have 
written the history of the Church as arising amid the dying 
struggles of the secular government, as- that old pagan impe- 
rialism flung out convulsively its waning strength. Allies, a 
convert with John Henry Newman from the EngUsh Estab- 
lished to the Roman Catholic Church, has written eloquently, 
but, as to a Protestant it must seem, scarce with the requisite 
fulness and thoroughness, the " Formation of Christendom," 
or the emergence of uev/ Christian peoples and rules out of 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRTSOSTOK 73 

the crash and dispersion of the elder pagan unity. A French 
jurist and scholar, Comte dc Champagny, has with great abil- 
ity portrayed the gradual interpenetration of Roman law and 
society by Christian principles. Several French scholars, and 
some German, have written of the fall of heathenism ; but the 
ground reniains yet not incapable of being afresh made to sus- 
tain, after the labors of Beugnot, Broglie, and Tzschirner, a 
new presentation of the way in which the Gospel became par- 
tially paganized, and heathenism, in turn, partially Christian- 
ized ; and over the soil thus cumbered and littered, barbarism 
came down to avenge God's betrayed cause, and yet, in God's 
great goodness, to receive new lights and helps from Christ's 
Gospel ; and how, on the other side, a refined but effete and 
paralyzed and empoisoned civilization was made to undergo 
its terrible discipline and chastisement, and yet was permitted 
to bequeath some shattered and scattered elements of art and 
knowledge and faith amid its deep woes, and spite of its fear- 
ful guiltiness. 

The number of distinguished writers and preachers of the 
Christian faith in the time of Chrysostoni and Augustine w^ns 
very great. It was an evidence of the intrinsic power of 
Christ's truth and oracles that when Roman power, and 
wealth, and art, and philosophy were so far misemployed or 
faithless in their trust, the book and churches and servants of 
Christ were yet able, in the face of great social disadvantages, 
to breed so many men and women of high excellence. It 
would be wearisome to recount the great names of Christian, 
witnesses who lived when the great Greek preacher was labor- 
ing at Antioch, his native city, or at Constantinople, the Eastern 
metropolis — afterward his residence — or who spoke or corre- 



^4: ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

sponded with or leaned upon Augustine in liis field of Christian 
labor in the northern provinces of Africa. The old Carthage, the 
scene of deadliest hostility to old republican Rome, had become 
now a possession of the Latin people. In its territory Augustine 
was born, and though teaching for a time in Italy at Milan, he 
returned to his native land, and the African city and see of 
Hippo he made the scene of his literary and religious activities. 

The one of these great preachers used the Greek tongue, 
and with a fulness, variety and power, and rhythm of utter- 
ance, that recalled the memory of the old orators and philoso- 
phers of pagan times, who had made that tongue the language 
of culture and fashion for the civilized w^orld. The other 
employed the Latin tongue, knowing Greek but scantily ; and 
though a student of Cicero, his own Latin was in many re- 
spects provincial, but it yet developed in his use of it an 
energy and richness and flexibility that showed alike the ca- 
pabilities of the tongue for its new Christian uses, and the 
powers of the speaker and writer who so made it tributary to 
Christ. Jerome, another Latin father among his contempora- 
ries, knew more of the Scriptures critically and of the original 
tongues of the Old and New Testaments, but in mastery of 
the Bible theology, and in ability to commend its truths to 
the learner, and to defend them against the errorist, he w^as 
not the equal and peer of Augustine. Using thus, in the two 
great languages, Greek and Latin, their ministry, the one in 
the East, and the other in the western and African portion of 
the same empire, these great preachers seem never to have met ; 
but we find Augustine warmly commending the character and 
merits of his Greek fellow-laborer, John of the Golden Mouth. 

Born to rank and wealth, his father an officer of military 



AUGUSTINE AND CHIiYSOSTOM. 75 

position, but who died, leaving to his young widow the care 
of their son, Chrysostom was the object of his mother's most 
faithful and tender solicitude. The heathen teacher to whom, 
for instruction in oratory and philosophy, he was brought, 
when told the story of the mother's self-denying assiduities 
for her son, is said to have exclaimed, in admiration of her 
worth, pagan as he was : " What women these Christians 
have!" Though Libanius is not named, it is supposed that 
he was the utterer of the words, for he was in the higher 
learning Chrysostom's instructor. Bigoted and keen -eyed 
pagan as Libanius was, the testimony has new force, if he 
were its utterer, as to the dignity and excellence of some 
Christian mothers amid the luxury and riot that so widely 
pervaded the higher circles of the empire. Intended for the 
Bar, which had then its open path to affluence and political 
power, Chrysostom displayed a pious zeal that brought the 
eyes of his Christian friends upon him as a. fitting candidate 
for the bishop's place. He evaded their choice, and had Basil, 
his friend, equally modest and reluctant with himself, substi- 
tuted. Out of this flight and substitution sprung the treatise 
" On the Priesthood," which has been the most generally read 
and reproduced of all his works. But, though breathing high 
zeal and consecration, it has views of ministerial power and of 
the virtue of Christian rites that show already a departure 
from the simplicity of the New Testament. From the mo- 
nastic seclusion into which Chrysostom long withdrew himself 
he was ultimately brought out, and his powers and success as 
a preacher made him at Antioch a name throughout the em- 
pire. After ten years' labor there he was chosen Archbishop 
of Constantinople by the Emperor Arcadius, in 398. 



^6 EEAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

He made himself admired and feared by the populace, and 
by the com't as well. The Empress Eudocia, displeased at 
some of his teachings, procured his exile. But the popular 
indignation, and the occurrence of an earthquake, which was 
interpreted as Heaven's own token of displeasure, procured his 
early recall. New umbrage was taken. Ecclesiastical rivals, 
envious of him, or angered at his faithfulness, wrought for his 
deposition, and by the orders of the Empress he was banished 
to a far and savage portion of the empire, his way, notwith- 
standing his age and infirmities, being so hurried that the 
journey proved fatal, and ere reaching the final term of the 
journey he ended his life and work. Such was the memory 
he had left behind, however, that, twenty-seven years after his 
death, his remains were brought back to the capital, the peo- 
ple in boats with torches going out to meet and honor the 
relics. His name, the Golden Mouth, was not belonging to 
him, but conferred by popular consent ufjon the great preach- 
er for copiousness and power. Surrounded by applause, often 
in the sanctuary, when his hearers, by clapping of hands, com- 
mended, as if in a theatre, he publicly reproved and checked 
the tumult, and inhibited the unseemly practice. Suidas 
speaks of his fluency as being like the Cataracts of the Nile. 
Later scholars have called him the Homer of the pulpit, and 
described him as uniting the energy of Demosthenes with the 
abundant flow and grace of Cicero. As a commentator on 
Scripture he is thought by many to have, in the soberness of 
his judgment, and closeness of his pursuit of the thoughts of 
the inspired writers, greatly transcended Augustine. Bishop 
Ellicott, a living authority, himself distinguished as a commen- 
tator on the New Testament, says of Chrysostom, " whom of 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 77 

all commentators I most honor and revere." But Luther, on 
the other hand, in his gruff fashion, finds Chrysostom to be 
full of digressions, and says that, when himself commenting 
on the Epistle to the Hebrews, ho could find in Chrysostom 
"nothing to the purpose." His works have been, in their 
huge extent, often reproduced ; and as a preacher he is held 
to this day, in fancy and vivacity, the equal of Jeremy Tay- 
lor, as in judgment and sobriety his superior. As a theolo- 
gian his "walk has seemed to be more on the nature of the 
Godhead and incarnation ; and the mind of a Christian Greek 
is seen in him, as cultured by the old Greek and Oriental phi- 
losophy, and bringing both to the exposition of scriptural 
statements. Neander held him to be the reproduction of the 
Apostle John, as the same great historian held Augustine to 
be more the type of Paul ; and that the man of Antioch and 
Constantinople was the embodiment of Christian love, like the 
great and last surviving apostle ; just as to Neander Augustine 
seemed the champion of truth and sound doctrine, like the 
man who withstood Peter and perished at the hands of Nero. 
We fail to see the justice of the parallel ; but all can perceive 
and confess how Augustine's mind, instead of breathing, like 
Chrysostom's, the spirit of Greek philosophy in its culture, 
seemed to show the reminiscences of Roman law in its com- 
pactness and energy and symmetry. 

Augustine had been early entangled in the snares of the 
Manichean heresy ; but the prayers of his devout mother, and 
the influence of God's grace and good providence, effected 
his entire deliverance. At first a teacher of rhetoric, he was 
drawn, as against his purposes and wishes, into the ministry. 
In faithful and unremitting energy he discharged the duties 

4* 



78 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

of his post. In withstanding Donatism, all may not accord in 
the applause some of his friends lavish upon him. Their pro- 
test against some of the corruptions of the Church was well 
founded ; and to the severe measures of the imperial govern- 
ment in repressing the Donatists, Augustine, though at first 
condemning them, gave too ready an adhesion at the last. 
As a preacher he was popular, and familiar, and untiring. 
As a commentator he has been very variously estimated. 
Archdeacon Hare held that, in this regard — as an expositor 
— Luther surpassed Augustine ; but the great Wycliffe valued 
Augustine next to the Bible. Bossuet was fond of his works. 
The elder Calamy, a Non-conformist of Baxter's day, had read 
all Augustine five times over. Jansenius, after whom the Jan- 
senist body are called, had read all his voluminous works ten 
times over, and then compiled his own folio volume, "Augus- 
tinus," presenting Augustine's views on the doctrine of grace 
in a form that for the time impressed France not only, but all 
Europe. Reiser, a German, compiled another folio, of equal 
size with that of Jansenius, to show how Augustine's teach- 
ings favored Protestantism. As if to keep up the moral kins- 
manship between the two great contemporary preachers of 
Hippo and Constantinople, Dom Massuet, one of the learned 
Benedictine scholars, compiled a folio volume out of Chrysos- 
tom, to show how he, equally with Augustine, was a support- 
er of the doctrine of grace. Great as was Massuet's reputa- 
tion for erudition, the manuscript never reached the press. It 
was probably dreaded by the dominant powers in the French 
Church as unduly aiding Jansenism. The manuscript has 
probably perished in the storms of the great French Revolu- 
tion. 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 79 

Of the vast compass of Augustine's mind it is a striking 
testimony that St. Beuve, himself unhappily sceptical, but a 
man of large reading and singular refinement and felicity of 
jadgraent, has said, as some great empires could be ruled by 
no single man, successor of the first framer of the empire, but 
needed partition in order to be cared for; so it would take a 
" dismembered Augustine," to use his striking phrase, to make 
up Bossuet and Fenelon, St. Cyran, the great Jansenist, and 
Malebranche, the great metaphysician. Cunningham, a recent 
worthy of the Free Scotch Church, has said of Augustine 
that to him, more than to any man, in the long interval from 
the days of the New Testament to the age of the Reformation, 
was given of God the glory of being the defender of this 
doctrine of grace. Steere, a clergyman of the English Estab- 
lished Church, pronounces him to have swayed opinion more 
than ever did any earthly potentate ; and Merivalc, another 
member of the same Establishment and a distinguished histo- 
rian, remarks upon the high moral influence which Augustine 
exercised over Puritanism in England, and the Jansenism of 
France, and the national history of Holland, and Scotland, and 
Geneva, and our own New England. 

His piety was ardent, and in this respect we fail to go with 
the estimate relatively pronounced by the most excellent Ne- 
ander that Chrysostom best represented John. In the fervor 
and depth of his religious piety the Bishop of Hippo must, 
we think, be held more nearly to approximate that high stand- 
ard. He was frank as Richard Baxter, and, like that Puritan 
worthy, Augustine had written his book of retractions, to 
recall, soften, or cancel what seemed on farther thought ex- 
ceptionable to himself in his earlier works. He wrote out of 



80 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

a full heart his " Confessions," a book which has produced on 
the Church an impression greater than any book of its class. 
Much of it a conference with God, it has earnest honesty and 
devoutest humility throbbing through all its sentences. It has 
been compared most unhappily with the diseased and leprous 
" Confessions " of Eousseau. It mio-ht be as well collated 
with Franklin's calm, cold autobiography, or the minute dis- 
section of his doubts and fears by the acute and holy Haly- 
burton, or the glorious " Grace Abounding " of the man who 
wrote the "Pilgrim's Progress." It shows a human heart, 
and as poured from a full heart has wakened sympathy and 
contrition and hope in thousands of readers. 

When pagans cavilled because Divine Providence did not 
shield from reverses and chastisements a Roman Empire nom- 
inally converted to the new faith, and the Vandals were in- 
vading and ravaging Africa, and besieging his own residence 
and diocese, Augustine prepared his " City of God," to show 
how the Most High really cares for the Church, his true city. 
As a philosophy of history it stands high, many devout Ro- 
manists say unapproached. We would not forget or disparage 
its merits. The book, as Allies has said, was the manual of 
the great Englishman, King Alfred, and of Charlemagne, and 
of the devout, brave, and wise King, St. Louis of France. It 
has instructed philosophers and Christians and statesmen and 
great rulers. It has done so because, as the Lord Jehovah in- 
terpreted his own misread providence to the weary and mis- 
judging Job, and vindicated to his servant the Master's and 
the Father's better wisdom, so here out of God's oracles men 
are taught some of the grand elements of the divine govern- 
ment of the nations. There, in what Augustine so beautifully 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 81 

calls the " severe mercy " — the " severe mercy " of God — it is 
seen that for communities, as for households and as for the 
solitary sufferer, " Nvhom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth," and 
the day's work cannot be measured aright until the day's 
end. When Augustine, full of days and toils and infirmity, 
was nearing his end, which he reached in his seventy-sixth year, 
the Vandal was investing the land and city of his habitation. 
But the errorist and the barbarian came to better by chasten- 
ing the great imperial people they humbled and plagued ; and 
in the bosom of the cloud that so beo-irt his home lurked 
the future evangelization of Europe, and the colonization by 
Europe of this our own America, then darkly, hopelessly pa- 
gan, at that time veiled from the Old World civilization and 
travel. 

More than any man's works those of Augustine* contributed 
to the Reformation. In Britain, Germany, France, and Switz- 
erland he, the old father of African Hippo, had his task to 
accomplish. His influence is not yet spcijt. 

Bendeman, one of the latest German biographers of Au- 
gustine, in a work which took its author twenty-five years to 
accomplish, dwells on the fact that Augustine's death -day 
(August 28, 430) was the same month and day of the month 
with the birthday of Goethe (August 28, 1749), some thirteen 
hundred and nineteen years after, and fancies that there were 
mental resemblances between the two men. One not a Ger- 
man may be forgiven if he hesitate to accept the coincidence 
as an omen. Augustine was Christ's, and with every fibre of 
his soul in his later years he was consecrated to that master's 
glory. Blessed they who accept the yoke, and who look up- 
ward in humble hope to a possession and welcome in the city 



82 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

on higb, whose earthly polity Augustine defended, whose heav- 
enly rest he is, we doubt not, now sharing. 

In the monastic system, which both of these great preach- 
ers, Augustine and Chrysostom, favored, and whose seclusion 
each of them had employed in the earlier stages of their 
Christian career, but which both virtually deserted when en- 
tering on their wider and more public career of usefulness, 
both yet remained indebted to an earlier institution that had 
been in reality the first cradle of their Christian graces; we 
mean the Christian family. The great Greek preacher at An- 
tioch and at Constantinople had been virtually formed by the 
influence of his widowed mother, Anthusia, left at the early 
age of twenty in charge of her fatherless John, afterward to 
be known as John of the Golden Mouth, filling the whole 
Roman Empire with the echo of his fearless warnings and his 
faithful instructions out of God's Book. And long as Augus- 
tine's memory is cherished, it is inextricably interwound with 
the history of his mother, Monica, so long tearfully and al- 
most hopelessly planning and praying for the conversion to 
God's truth of her wayward and misguided son. Whatever 
either of these great men owed to the hermitage or the mon- 
astery, they owed yet more to the Christian home ; and yet 
such homes and households much of their heedless utterance 
represented as Icvss sacred and less safe for Christ's servant 
than the desert and the monk's cell. And if woman, severed 
from her rightful place, and denied her Heaven -given influ- 
ence in the participation of the good work of the diffusion of 
Christ's Gospel, as in the apostolic age — a Phebe and a Lois 
and a Eunice and a Persis and a Priscilla and a Lydia had 
shared it — were tempted to think her memorial passed over 



AUGUSTIXE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 83 

in the eyes of her God, when Christian parents and teachers 
like Augustine and Clirysostom seemed ignoring it, the very 
graces of the forgetful sons established ultimately, in their 
conversion and consecration, how great were the legitimate 
claims of their saintly mothers. Adown the stream of time 
comes the history of cither doctor — him of Hippo and him 
of Constantinople — an embodied illumination of the might 
and the right of Christian woman, to aid in training Christ's 
most honored and most effective servitors. Their prayers, 
over cradle and in closet, speak out of the pages of their 
gifted sons. 

"When paganism was yet employing the strength of its ebb- 
ing life in corrupting the Christian faith which it could no 
longer bar out, the powers that most effectually curbed this 
heathenism were not always those heard in the sacred desk or 
read in the written page, as some great teacher's hand had in- 
scribed that page. Back of all this was the mightier power 
of prayer. And, though little noted of the outer world, and 
overlooked too often even by the Christian Church, yet in the 
purpose and schemes of the Almighty Worker what human 
contribution weighed more, or was accorded a larger approval, 
than this same prayer of the nursery and closet and smaller 
Christian assembly, where holy women waited upon God ? If 
the widow's mite told in the treasury as Christ watched it, 
the widow's vow told in the study, the pastorate, and the 
mission-field, as Christ watched them. "When Mary, the hu- 
man mother of our Lord, hid in her heart the truths learned 
concerning him — when an earlier mother, Hannah, who, in the 
dark days of Eli's dotage, and of the apostasy of Hophni and 
Phinehas, remembered her infant Samuel in her lonely, remote 



84 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

seclusion — was there not for tliat believing woman a share 
in the after exploits of her prophet son, as for the other and 
later in the work of our Lord? And so prayer, the simplest 
expression of the human dependence, and the most energetic 
invocation of the Divine Omnipotence — prayer was the root 
of the true piety that flamed in the pulpit, or that bore its 
meek, heroic appeal up to the stake, or that even petulantly 
overlooked its own infant indebtedness amid the austerities of 
the convent or hermitage. It was so assuredly in the ages 
long past. It remains so in our own times. Moses, with 
arms stretched heavenward, and those arms held up by his 
attendants, Aaron and Hur, was fighting Amalek as really as 
did the forces, equipped with spear and axe, engaged on the 
plain below. And the sex last at the cross and first at the 
tomb have yet their large part, though little remembered and 
scantily requited, in the prayer that attracts the might of 
Heaven, and wins the only real and sure triumphs for God's 
truth. 

When Joshua's sword was wasting the routed Canaanites, 
five of their kings had, as separated from their dispersed and 
disheartened retainers, taken refuge in the cave of Makkedah. 
A rock was rolled to its mouth, till the flight was successfully 
pursued as against the body of the combatants. Meanwhile, in 
the gloom and isolation of the cavern, what were the prospects 
and resources of the King of Jerusalem and his four brother 
chieftains of heathen Canaan? When the sword had wasted 
without, the time came when the rock was rolled away from 
the cavern's mouth and the foot of Israel was on the captives' 
necks, and soon the fatal halter swung the victims into death 
from the land which their crimes had forfeited, as a possession 



AUGUSTINE AND CURYSOSTOM. 85 

for themselves or for their people. And is not such the pro- 
spective outlook of adverse forces that, in lands not Christian, 
and in the irreligious and infidel protests of nominal Christen- 
dom, resist and deride the faith of Christ? The sword of 
truth has hewn down the paganism of former ages, and is not 
fruitlessly assailing the idolatries and false faiths of this nine- 
teenth century. Shut in the cave of Makkedah, what is the 
attitude of those who see the tide of missionary enterprise and 
missionary success daily broadening its triumphs in the portion 
of our globe heretofore unevangelized ? Prayer many of these 
thinkers utterly reject; prison Jehovah in the vise of unalter- 
able law ; muzzle Christ's Church into mute, prayerless apathy. 
In their agnosticism they know no God to whom prayer may 
be addressed, and believe that to offer it were time and hope 
absurdly and idly employed. 

But the word of God is on its mission, meanwhile and never- 
theless. Bibles and missions and prayer-meetings arc beyond 
dispute spreading that word of God, and unless our missionary 
laborers utterly mistake and misrepresent, the field of ignoranxje 
and error is each year growing narrower, and the welcome of 
the Gospel is cordial and eager in lands long bound in error or 
swathed in dark hopelessness. Contrast with the prayerless 
gloom of the cave of Makkedah the lot of the first Christian 
disciples and preachers, in the days when the book of the Acts 
was not yet written, but was in the process of being acted. 
The sword of Herod has smitten James. Herod's soldiers and 
prisons have charge of Peter, and safe they will keep him. 
Behind the power and edge of Herod's glistening, thirsting 
sword is brandished the more tremendous sword of Caesar. 
Few^ and poor and discredited, the disciples at Jerusalem are 



,86 ERAS AND CEAMACTERS OF HISTORY. 

shut up in the house of Mark's mother. Desolation abroad 
and darkness within, has not this become a true cave of Mak- 
kedah, where the remnant, as yet surviving the slaughter in the 
high places of judicature, are but awaiting their turn to be 
brought out ? No ; within this guarded seclusion all is not 
gloom ; it is not the muttering of despair, but it is the voice of 
prayer that is heard in the feeble band. Is there a sob in the 
supplication ? It is interrupted because Peter himself knocks 
at the door to tell that, shackles loosed and gates of his dun- 
geon flung open, he is free, and God, the Christ, is yet the Al- 
mighty : let Herod and Herod's master, Caesar, plan their wisest 
schemes, and do ruthlessly to the worst of their unholy pur- 
poses, and to the uttermost of their capacities and opportuni- 
ties. There was no prayer, except perchance to Baal or Mo- 
loch, in the old cave of Makkedah. There was in the house 
of Mark's mother, where cowered the disciples, prayer to Je- 
hovah; and he was then, and means to remain for evermore, 
the one ruler of all lands. The centuries are notched by the 
plans of our Christ, as but the dates for the timely develop- 
ment of his faithfulness. And the Christian men and the 
Christian women that in this prayer of faith cast their work, 
their pulpits, their missions, and their martyrdoms on the 
arm of the Omnipotent, and on the bosom of our Elder Broth- 
er, king of the nations and king of saints, shall find that the 
lapse of ages has not bedimmed the clearness of his presaging 
vision, nor has the raging of the people made the Son of the 
Father to become disinherited of the old engagement, that this 
Father is to give the uttermost parts of the earth for his, the 
Christ's, possession. Now, in such prayer, persistent, simple, 
tireless, earnest, and lowly, is either sex, in the great framework 



AVGUSTINE AND CHRYSOiiTOM. 87 

of society, is every age, from childhood to hoary eld, is every 
homestead, invited to do its share; and so the barriers that 
old paganism or modern infidelity deemed to be very caves of 
Makkedah turn out, instead, like the habitation where in the 
days of the first martyrdoms the first disciples made supplica- 
tion. The intercession that is in its first utterance burdened 
with sobs breaks into triumphant exultations at its close, when 
at the door is heard the announcement that God has responded 
soon as his people have begun to intercede. A godless, prayer- 
less despair and a godless, self-reliant pride have each of them 
but their caverns dark and forlorn of Makkedah, and they 
are found in need the most wretched of refuges. A Christian, 
prayerful hope may have its trials and reverses, but when bow- 
ed over the grave of its dead martyrs, it has the God of those 
martyrs, the ever-living — and what can it need more? The 
apostles, in the days when their enterprise loomed in all its 
vastness, before their daily perception of their own weakness 
of influence and smallness of number, lingered in this work of 
supplication, regarding it as one never to be slighted. They 
cast on others the charge of the poor and of the church reve- 
nues ; but said they, " We will give ourselves continually to 
prayer and to the ministry of the Word." Apostles divinely 
furnished yet resorted to incessant prayer. 

That prayer, in which each disciple has his and her respon- 
sibility, remains to this day the condition of growth for the 
Church, the indispensable element of her power. Multiform 
and incessant as were the activities of Augustine, he had in 
his last days inscribed upon the walls of his chamber, and in 
full sight from his death-bed, seven of the Psalms of David ; 
and over these he pondered and interceded. The barba- 



88 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

rian pressing the siege of the city without ; the cares of the 
churches far abroad coining upon him for advice and conso- 
lation; the complaints of the heathen that the empire, its 
old pagan gods renounced, was no longer safe ; and the in- 
firmities of his own many years heavy upon him — it was in 
the words of old prayers and of ancient promises kept thus 
before him that he kept up hope and heart, and was able to 
speak of his inextinguishable longing after the vision of the 
Lord as with dying breath. " Glory be to God for all thino-s ! 
Amen !" was, in exile and weariness, the dying utterance of 
his old fellow-combatant, Chrysostom. Prayer, that thus con- 
tinually approached the Infinite and the Omnipotent One, was 
thus the reliance and employ of these great champions. 

And now as to their work. The pulpit is, to some minds, 
on the verge of its term ; its lease of the nations, as these 
objectors judge, is nearly expired. The press, say they, re- 
places, and must supersede, the pulpit; but, as Milton and 
others have taught, freedom is indispensable to the full range 
of power for the press. AVhence came this freedom of the 
press, if not from the testimonies and incarcerations and mar- 
tyrdoms of Christian confessors, themselves in life and death 
preachers? And at this very hour how many tongues, once 
destitute of alphabets and books, owe the contributions of the 
press toward their education and enfranchisement to Christ's 
preaching messengers ! But for the Gospel, civilization had, 
in this nineteenth centary, given these poor heathea but bran- 
dy and muskets, and all the worst vices of a corrupt and ef- 
fete culture, and left them, thus furnished, to kill themselves 
off the soil. The missionary interposed between this ruin 
and the savage; and primer and Bible and hymn and free 



AUGUSTINE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 89 

laws Lave to many a far tribe come in the train of Christian 
evangelization. Thns, and thus only. And take away the 
evangelical churches of our time, and how soon would Index 
and Syllabus write that a free press was but a curse and a 
snare, and shut down the lids of God's own volume as a per- 
ilous book for the laity. 

A free press needs the pulpit as the condition for its own 
existence; and the God who meant the nations for his own 
incarnate Son gave the pledge, that the knowledge of the 
glory of that Son should flood the earth. In what other way, 
according to his own showing, but by many running to and 
fro — messengers of his sending and of his owning? Till he 
recalls that pledge, we must believe that, by the foolishness of 
preaching, he will subdue all nations to the obedience of the 
faith. Perchance he knew the destinies of the peoples and 
the ages, the future of his own handiwork, and the goal of 
his own path adown the eternities. The rejected Christ, a 
stone of stumbling evermore to his foes, is yet the corner- 
stone of God's successful architecture. And what man has 
rated as the foolishness of preaching has been selected and 
blessed as the enginery of a Divine Wisdom, to make truth 
ultimately the one law of the universe. *' The truth," said 
the Christ, " shall make you free." 



90 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 



V. 

-BUDDHISM. 

It is recorded of himself by one of tlie eminent scholars of 
our time, John Henry Newman, how much he felt, when it 
was quoted to him, the force of the saying, *' Securus judicat 
orbis." For those who have forgotten the Latin of their 
school-boy days this old adage may be rendered in English 
phrase, " The world when agreed can scarcely judge wrongly." 
The show of power that lies behind a vast majority when dic- 
tating an opinion, or when swaying an action, is not to be 
denied. And yet that this power is also a right — that the 
might carries the equity and the truth with its strength of 
numbers and force of influence — may well be questioned. 
Our Revolutionary fathers, a paltry minority as against the 
rest of the British empire, disputed the right of the over- 
whelming majority in the mother country to make their Colo- 
nial laws and to give away from the founders of these new 
Western plantations their hereditary Saxon liberties. The 
argument, patiently continued from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, 
has been thought to settle, that, here at least, the maxim of 
authority as inhering in mere numbers did not hold good. 

Still less can it be maintained, that, in matters of religious 
faith, the thronging multitude of adherents who accept a creed 
or a deity must be allowed to vote down all dissent, and to 
render, when the count is completed, the mass who constitute 



BUDDHISM. 91 

the overwhelming majority the supreme arbiters as to what 
should become the common faith. When, in consequence of 
the wide sweep of heresy, the old and scriptural views as to 
the nature of the Godhead and Redeemer seemed likely to be 
abandoned, an Athanasius standing " against the world " has 
been regarded by Christians of later times as occupying a post 
which was alike that of Christian fidelity and of high moral 
heroism. Truth — the verity as God gave it and as the Church 
of God is bound to hold it — is something more than a calcula- 
tion made by the census -taker, as to the relative population 
behind a dogma. 

A scholar, but unhappily somewhat bigoted when the evan- 
gelical faith WV1S in question, the late Rowland Williams, has 
called "Buddhism the greatest of all historical difiiculties 
which Christian advocates have to deal with."* The relieious 
system known as Buddhism has, according to the statistic esti- 
mates ordinarily current, a large preponderance over any other 
form of faith in the millions of our race who receive it. By a 
very rough and crude mode of reckoning, indeed, as it must be 
allowed, the Buddhists are made to include four hundred and 
seventy or five hundred millions, out of the one thousand two 
hundred and fifty millions of mankind now tenanting our 
planet, or more than one-third of the living men of the hour. 
All forms of Christianity, it is estimated, gather in but little 
more than one-fourth of the w'orld's present occupants. 

Now, it is to be observed that, in casting the four hundred 
or more millions of the Chinese empire into the mass of the 
Buddhist believers, there is involved a very grievous uncertainty 

* Life aud Letters, i. 244. 



92 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and a very questionable assumption. China has, as her profes- 
sional and political faith, Confucianism — a system of ethics 
merely for the present life, and mainly that as seen on its po- 
litical side, and which some would hold atheistic or at best 
agnostic. Then, besides. Buddhism, the populous empire has 
Taaoism, which is but a system of idols many. And the recep- 
tion of these three distinct faiths is found througli that dense- 
ly peopled empire in no distinct layers, and with no marked 
lines of severance. To attach the whole population of the em- 
pire to Buddhism is, then, a very wild confusion of epithets ; 
and a moral spiritual census much more precise than the gov- 
ernment at home or travellers from abroad have ever bea*an is 
needed to ascertain the true contribution of the Flowery Land, 
as the Chinese call their country, to the old faith of Buddha. 
Were the strict Buddhists found but a third of the Chinese 
people, then the total mass of Buddhists in the world would 
not overpass that of the adherents nominally of the Christian 
faith. 

Some have proposed to write a history of religions com- 
paratively, as the result of progress and the last flowering of 
civilization. Paul spoke of " the world as by wisdom knowing 
not God." But to us it sadly seems as if some of these new 
theorists had actually read it, that the " world by wisdom made 
God." No Fall, according to them, needed a new message 
from the skies to recall from its estrangement the race thus 
hurled from loyalty and truth. But man, by culture and phi- 
losophy has, on this assumption, slowly excogitated a God — a 
Deity that need not be ashamed of himself; and who might 
well be expected to be grateful to the sages and legists, who 
had mined, refined, minted, and stamped him, and sent him 



BUDDHISM. 93 

forth with their sovereign imprint for general currency and 
reverence. It is, we would say, in passing, not the Jeliovali of 
our Bible and of our fathers ; his comment on such processes 
long ago was, " Who hath required this at your hand ?" 

But for Buddhism it is said that not only does it commend 
itself by the number of its adherents, but, for the gravity of its 
moral precepts, and for its kindliness, not merely to man but 
to the lower animals as well, it may be placed beside the Gos- 
pel. Let us look to its history and its founder. 

The believer in the Scriptures of the Old and New Tes- 
tament watches with profound interest the method in Avhich 
God seems to have made certain great eras in the history of 
the nations memorable by great changes. Change by growth 
has not dispensed, in the divine rule, with change by convul- 
sions. As in the earthquake of Lisbon, that carried such deso- 
lation to the shores of Portugal, the shuddering of the earth 
was felt on our own continent also, on this side of the broad 
Atlantic and at the root of our Alleghanies, so the moral re- 
sults of the lesson were profound and far-spread. It caused 
Voltaire, in the beginning of his sceptical career, to indite a 
poem questioning and blaspheming Providence; and it led the 
English Howard to a voyage of benevolence, interrupted in 
which, by what seems to us a strange oversight of Divine Provi- 
dence, he fell into the power of a French privateer, and was 
carried prisoner to Brest. There he knew the terrors and hor- 
rors of a prison life, and this it was which gave occasion to his 
ministry of mercy to the dungeons of Europe and their in- 
mates — beginning at Bedford jail, but flashing its monition 
over the civilized world. Perhaps Providence was as little 
really oblivious of mercy and equity, in permitting an incarcer- 

5 



94 EBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

ation of Howard that was to be so blessed in quietening his 
Christian sympathies, as it was beforehand in arranging the 
earthquake, and in allowing silentl}?" the mocking comments of 
the arch-scorner of France upon the way in which God ruled 
his planet. 

An era, indeed, not of terrene upheaval, but of political earth- 
quakes, accompanied the arrival to earth of Buddha. The 
chronology is so unsettled, and the conflict as to Buddha's 
birth-time so fierce, that a great Sanscrit scholar, Wilson, rather 
doubted whether Buddha himself were not a myth. But the 
great body of investigators regard his career as in substance 
a group of historical facts. Some place the year of Buddha's 
birth in 598 B.C., which was the year also of Nebuchadnezzar's 
taking Jerusalem. Buddha's death is placed by most about 
543 B.C., or somewhere about the time when Cyrus, the great 
King of Persia, and the friend of the Jews in their rebuilding 
of that Temple which Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed, was over- 
throwing the kingdoms of Media and Lydia. Long before 
Greece fought the battle of Marathon, or the Tarquins were 
expelled from Eome, this Indian prince, Gautama Siddhatha or 
Sakya Mouni, the sage of the Sakyas, the tribe to which he 
belonged, was born in the family of a prince reigning in a re- 
gion north of Benares. The name of Buddha, the Enlightened 
or Wise, was one afterward given to him. Bred in princely 
ease and luxury, a husband and a father, he is said in one of 
his rides to have observed an old man, withered, bent, and stag- 
gering ; in another ride, a sick and blind man ; and in still a 
third, a corpse carried to the burial — sights all before kept by 
the luxurious isolation of his training entirely apart from his 
view. lie inquired, and found that age, sickness, and death 



BUDDHISM. 95 

were the lot of all men. Suddenly and secretly lie left wife 
and child, quitting his princess and babe as they lay asleep. 
Leaving parents and home, he consorted at first with austere 
Bramins, undergoing all privations and dwelling in the forest, 
a recluse and self-mortified penitent musing on the wretched- 
ness and uncertainty of this life. Discontented with Braminic 
usages and the result of his penances, he sought in seclusion, 
by a system of his own of solitary discipline and meditation, 
to school himself and to train others for some correction of the 
miseries of human life. At Benares, the sacred city, he found 
his first five disciples. Sought in vain by his royal relations, 
foregoing ease and home, he became, by self-denial, humility, 
and kindliness, the centre soon of a cro^Yd of disciples and fel- 
low-penitents. 

It was recognized afterward, though not yet known to him- 
self, that he was the incarnation of a god, but he had in the in- 
terval to undergo great struggles, not only with the dominant 
Braminic priesthood opposed to his views of seeking good, 
but from Mara, the spirit of evil, appearing to him from the 
sky, and promising him after seven days a universal empire 
over the four continents, if he would abandon his enterprise. 
Had one hurtful, malignant, or angry thought been stirred in 
Gautama's mind, the tempter would have succeeded in crossing 
Gautama's purpose. But the evil one failed. Cutting ofi his 
long hair and sending back his royal ornaments home, the 
perlitent became a homeless and mendicant wanderer. For six 
years, with his faithful five disciples, he persevered in austeri- 
ties till worn to a shadow. Dissatisfied with the result, he 
turned to seek peace in seclusion, study, and self-denial. Un- 
der a fig-tree, the shoots of which are yet shown (planted in 



96 ERAS AND CHARACTEES OF HISTORY. 

Ceylon), his old temptations came back ; but after a time his 
doubts cleared away — he had become Buddha, or Enlightened. 
The mystery of sorrow, and its causes and cure, had become 
known to him. Meditation and love to others was the true 
remedy of this inward and corroding grief. He proposed to 
turn the wheel of the law, founding a new kingdom of right- 
eousness, or a universal monarchy of truth. After finding 
under the fig-tree this intellectual change, his disciples, now 
sixty, w^re summoned and sent out to teach. He and his 
emissaries travelled, and preached, and begged their bread, amid 
jeers and insults, but not without winning many converts. 

In his mendicant peregrinations he reached the home of his 
father. There his wife and son became proselytes, as had his 
brothers before them. When that father dies, at the age of 
ninety-seven, Gautama returns to oversee the burning of the 
body, and resumes his work. Ladies of the royal family ask 
to become female mendicants and recluses, and are allowed. 
When dying he told his weeping disciples that the parts of 
men must be dissolved ; and his last words were a charge to 
work out their own salvation with diligence. He had not 
fully relinquished Braminism, but his system of merit differed 
from it. 

Asoka, an Indian prince, reigning about 250 B.C., living 
some two hundred years after Buddha, did for Buddhism 
what Constantine did for Christianity — he established it. But 
Braminism rose up against this new and reformed shape of 
Braminism, and by bitter persecution, continued through sev- 
eral centuries, extirpated it from Hindostan. Buddhism proper 
did not recognize a soul or a Creator ; did not give up the old 
Braminic faith of transmio-ration ; held that a stern fate made 



BUDDHISM. 97 

sorrow follow transgression in these several changes of lot from 
being to being ; these brought at last Nirvana or Nigban, as the 
Burman calls it. Of this many hold it impossible to be dis- 
tinguished from extinction, others think it a passionless, unex- 
cited state, to be followed by no new births into other beings. 

Asoka, in a great synod held about the time when Rome 
finished the first Punic War, sent missionaries to proclaim the 
Buddhist faith in remote lands, east and west, north and south. 

It had its monastic institutions and schools, and for many 
centuries maintained its war against Braminism, which it 
sought to reform. But, somewhere about the year 1100 of 
our era, it was well-nigh extirpated from Hindostan, its native 
country, by the fierceness and persecution of Braminism. But 
in Ceylon, which it early won, it has continued to our own 
times; and so in Thibet; and it penetrated into Siberia. Into 
China it is said to have found its way before the end of the 
first Christian century, not far from the days when Paul was 
on his way to Rome to witness for Christ before Nero. But 
in Thibet it had to accept great modifications. The Lamaism 
of that country recognizes a new Buddha incarnate in their 
Chief Priest or Grand Lama, who is worshipped. A British 
Governor-general of India is said to have sent to congratulate 
this heathen divinity on his "accession," as the English office- 
holder termed the passage of the new incumbent to the throne 
of Deity. And while, in its original form and in its native 
country, Buddhism had made meditation the great secret of 
self-control, wisdom, and virtue, and had ignored God and 
prayer, in Thibet they not only pray, but do it by machinery, 
attaching written petitions to the arms of a wheel. As these 
revolve the request is supposed to be with each turn presented 



98 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

anew to the powers above. Mendicancy, and monastic estab- 
lishments, and the yellow robe distinguishing the Buddhist 
priests from all others, and strings of beads to mark the num- 
ber of prayers offered, all are strange assimilations to the Ro- 
man Catholic usages. But, both of Thibet and of China, trav- 
ellers have brought the like statements, as to the evil results 
of an errant mendicant life, and of seclusion in a monastery, 
that have been rife as to similar institutions in Europe. 

To a leper and to a slave Buddha denied admission into his 
community. In this respect the vaunted charity of the order 
did not, like that of the Gospel, reach the outcast and the per- 
ishing. It claims to be especially tender of animal life, and 
insists on the merits of large alms-giving. But it failed to 
stand up ultimately against Braminism, and the polytheism, 
and cruelty, and foulness of that system — succumbing in India 
at the close of the unequal struggle. 

It has been believed by some, even the late Dean Mansel 
amono; them, that some of the Buddhist missionaries from the 
great synod of Asoka reached Egypt two hundred years be- 
fore our Saviour's birth, and that their influence, won in the 
land of the Nile, left behind the Therapeuta? and the Essenes 
who are spoken of as hermits and monastic recluses, before the 
time when our Lord's forerunner, John the Baptist, commenced 
his mission. 

As a story of the self-denial of the Buddha, it is said that 
once, when in the form of a hare, he gave his own body and 
life for a hungry tigress who had failed to get food for her 
young; and that the Hindoo god, who had in disguise set 
before Buddha the trial, rewarded and commended him by 
painting the image of the hare on the face of the moon. And 



BUDDHISM. 99 

tlie rude outline that Anglo-Saxon and German fable calls the 
Man in the Moon is to the Thibetian the Hare in the Moon, 
the record to this day of the self-denial with which Buddha 
was willing to give up his own life, to stay hunger even in 
what he thouo;ht but a beast. 

Some of these Thibetian legends of the Buddha have caused 
Buddha himself, it is said by many scholars, to pass into the 
Eoman Calendar under the name of St. Josaphat, whose dis- 
courses with Barlaam, a favorite media3val book, are but the 
recasting of the devout parables and stories of Thibctians who 
worship Buddha. 

Eecurring, then, to the wide diffusion of the histories and 
legends of Gautama, does the world's wide reception, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, of some of these narratives give 
any indication that, for the Sakya Mouni, the Gautama of the 
old Rajput tribe of India, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, of 
Solon, and of Cyrus, and of Daniel, there remains such wide 
diffusion as the story and prophecies of Daniel have now 
secured with their readers beside the Hudson, and the Mis- 
sissippi, and the St. Lawrence, and the Amazon, and the 
Thames, and the Rhine, and the Danube, and the Nile, and 
the Ganges? 

The relative force of the influences that Christianity and 
Buddhism bring into conflict Avith each other may well be 
considered in forming our judgment, as to the one which is 
most likely to win the ultim.ate and universal sway. As to 
the religious books of the two, the competitor from the far 
ancient East moves into the field w^ith an unwieldy baggage 
of literature to be reproduced and distributed by the teachers, 
and to be studied by the patient proselyte. Hardy, an Eng- 



100 Eli AS AND CHARACTERS OF EJSTORY, 

lish missionary who has labored among the votaries of this 
faith in the island of Ceylon, and translated more than one of 
the Buddhist volumes, estimates the scriptures of the Buddh- 
ists in the Pali languages to be more than eight times the 
size of the English Bible, and with the commentaries in re- 
pute they are more than ten times the mass of our Scriptures. 
Another writer makes the proportion yet greater : the Buddh- 
ist scriptures are, according to him, as measured against the 
English, twelve times the size.* Beale holds that the Sanscrit 
sacred books of the Buddhists translated into Chinese would 
make a bulk seven hundred times that of the New Testament. 
If in God's good providence our Bibles for household and 
school were at once expanded into a decade or seven decades 
of volumes, where now we bear about but one, it is seen how 
the labors of collator and student, and the gifts of charity 
largely bestowing the guide upon the needy, must be fearfully 
enhanced as to the draught then made upon the student's time 
and upon the purse of the beneficent : and the book, now lying 
on the invalid's stand or borne in the travelling wallet, must 
be relegated to library shelves, perchance to pass ultimately to 
the dust and oblivion of the lumber-room. Moses, and Isaiah, 
and David, and Paul, and John would, thus overlaid with the 
huge mass of their accompaniments, be banished from the 
closet where they cheered and instructed of old the solitary 
worshipper, and from the pulpit whence in earlier times their 
tones resounded over the throngs in pew and aisle of the sanct- 
uary ; to be, instead, unconsulted tenants of the lonely wilder- 
ness for whom no man inquired. Buddhism, in the collision, 

* "Sagas from Far East," p. 333. 



BUBDmSJf. 101 

perishes by tlie weight of her surphis incumbrances. She is 
lost in the forest of her own authorities. 

But a more grave deficiency of Buddhism is that, while 
morality is her chief strength, that very morality is dismem- 
bered and inexcusably defective. The system of duty as 
taught in both the New Testament and the Old, its precursor, 
placed in the front rank of obligations not only what Buddh- 
ism recognized, man's obligations to his fellow -mortal, but 
those also, earlier and vaster and more searching, which bind 
the man to his Maker, his Ransomer, and his Judge. But in 
the case of the Eastern rival, it must be said that the Moses 
of this Oriental Buddhistic dispensation, in descending to in- 
struct his charge, has dropped the first of the two tables of 
the law by the way, and presents himself to his neophytes 
with but the second and inferior part of the code. Man lives 
with his neighbor and in some sense for his neighbor; but 
not mainly even, much less exclusively, for the sake of his 
brother-mortal and brother-sinner. Destitute of a God and a 
lieaven, he will soon be reft from his earthly brother's side; 
and over whose cradle or whose grave, as he draws his dying 
breath, in his farewell, he can then do no more, going the way 
of all the earth, unreturning and unremembering. 

And here comes in the grand deficiency of this and each 
other human religion as a system of morality. Grant that the 
code of ethics were perfect as a scheme and system, they would 
yet, as meeting man in his existing necessities and imperfec- 
tions, be deficient, long as they failed to present the adequate 
motives and the supernal powers, that should spur him from 
his apathy and his guiltiness to seek recovery from his old 
wrong-doings, and to desire effectually the accomplishment of 



102 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

each duly revealed to him. No moral system can bless man 
that lacks sanctions and motives and remedial energies. The 
best of portraitures, while a\Yalvening cold, transitory admira- 
tion, would lack efficiency if it did not inspire and stimulate 
to the desire after like virtue and holiness. The morals of 
earth and its legislators are but cut flowers, however rich their 
bloom and fragrance. Their stem is rootless, and their per- 
fume is seedless. They have no term of perpetuity, and no 
power of producing, out of the blight of autumn, the renewed 
buds of spring. The religion of the Nazarene, and the love 
of the incarnate and crucified Redeemer, has its roots and its 
indestructible seeds. It lends new and higher motives to the 
heart, else condemned and despairing. Its bidding is, that the 
self-condemned mourner see and welcome a full, present, and 
enduring pardon in the Atonement ; and it undertakes to effect 
a new creation in the regenerate soul, by the influence of the 
Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. Its flowers are not cut specimens 
that show for a night in the vase, and on the mantel, and as 
the garland. They are flowers of the garden, set in the soil 
and under the sunbeam and the shower of heaven, and even 
under the ripening frosts of the winter they retain their vital- 
ity, and re-assert their power in the vernal seasons of after 
years. Give to man, as Christ's Gospel gives him, a divine 
pardon and a divine pattern, genuine repentance and inner 
renewal — a God in the Incarnation come near to sympathize, 
and in the Judgment coming down again to inquire and to 
adjudicate and to recompense — and the morals of the mortal 
thus brought home to God have a force and freshness, an in- 
destructibility which no other system can hope to rival. Other 
systems show models. This melts the soul in gratitude, and 



BUDDHISM. 103 

then casts it into the mould of sound doctrine and divine 
assimilation. 

And it is, in tlie study of the past history of Buddhism, its 
code, its missions, and its various adaptations to the usages 
and errors of the idolatries which it has partially cultivated, an 
evident and glaring want, that it has not adequately met the 
needs of the individual soul. Growing out of a system of 
transmigration in the older and more systematic Braminism, 
which taught men to expect migrations to mineral, plant, 
bird, beast, reptile, man, and minor deity to the number of 
8,400,000,* hundreds of times as many as the years during 
which our planet has stood, it destroys virtually man's person- 
ality, the first element of his greatness, and of his responsibil- 
ity, and of his happiness, and of his worth. This present life 
is to him the re-appearance of one and of many that went 
before, and which he has utterly forgotten. It is to be re- 
placed by a new life, which will leave no lingering remem- 
brance of this present one. With merit, and with the good- 
will of a blind fate (to which he has no right to pray, however), 
he may become a god ; and if meditating profoundly and pas- 
sionately, he may pass into the Nirvana or Nigban of uncon- 
scious, unintelligent apathy: Extinction, as most read it; a 
blessedness without thought, feeling, or act, or word, as others 
read it. Where is the person — the I — through all these vari- 
ous Sittings and filterings that range from world to world, and 
from heaven to heaven, and from hell to hell ? — for the Indian 
Buddhist has his hells and heavens in large variety, though not 
eternal. 

* Monier Williams, p. 51. 



104 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

What is there in all this, — if you make it quiet as sleep, and 
lasting as eternity, and voiceless as the grave, — that shall once 
enter into comparison with those scenes of eternal gladness 
and holy repose which the followers of Christ expect in the 
presence of their blessed Redeemer? What, in Nirvana, can in 
majesty or in attractiveness match the palms and anthems and 
golden crowns and holy fellowship of the New Jerusalem ? 

"My flesh crieth out for the living God," said the Psalmist. 
It is the desire, God-bred, that shall also by the grace of the 
Enkindler be God-filled. Nature and conscience, and Provi- 
dence and history, as well as Revelation, pant with an inextin- 
guishable, inexpressible earnestness after the society, the favor, 
the fatherly smile, the fraternal welcome, the saintly consola- 
tion of the Jehovah, Father in his benignity. Brother in his 
interposition, and the Comforter in his sovereign and timely 
refreshings. 

And from man's nature, if we pass to the character of man's 
Maker, as he has cast aside, in the oracles of his own inditing, 
the veil that our weakness and our sin had flung over his 
countenance, if we carry up the argument from the nature of 
man to the nature of God, we must draw the inference, as we 
judge in all scientific rigor, that the Creator has not despised 
his own handiwork; and will from the moral necessities of his 
own relation to us carry forward the indestructible cravings of 
the soul he fashioned, the partial intimations of his Providence, 
and the explicit pledges of his Revelation, to an issue solemn, 
perfect, and final. Not only has the Bible bidden us to pray, 
but man's needs and woes, and hopes and fears have alike ex- 
torted prayer. Buddhism in its pure and original form 
ignored prayer. It taught only meditation. Concentrated in 



BUDDHIS2I. 105 

himself, his eyes diverted inwardly, from nature and society, 
from all that could stir and provoke and amuse, to passionless, 
aimless musing, it froze prayer out of the soul ; if a being 
denied true personality and looking to virtual extinction as his 
highest goal could be called, in any right sense, a soul. Peti- 
tion thus nullified and banned, the life of the soul would go 
out as a mouse perishes breathless in an exhausted receiver. 
A Creator ignored — for pure Buddhism did not recognize 
creation — and no being left to hear prayer, and man with no 
right or capacity for prayer, the Buddhist doctrine laid, as a 
system of morals, its swaddling bands as a stiller over the lips 
of infant and helpless humanity. Over the cradle bent no 
celestial nurse, and Gautama choked the cry of the helpless. 
A contemporary poet describes man's forlornness — 

"With no language but a cry." 

The ancient and vaunted system of the East binds over the 
nursling with the stern monition, man is born 
*' With no right e'en to a cry," 

Prayerless, personless, hopeless, let him migrate. But who 
knows whither his migration floats him ? 

Now, judging the past progress of the race as affording 
some omens for its prospects in the future, we ask, is it likely 
that God will abandon the nations that have had a Christian 
literature, a Christian legislation, a Christian history, Chris- 
tian libraries and schools and missions, to such a forlorn issue 
as the last outgate? Is it, as the young princely Gautama 
saw it, in the foul, sad experience of his drives — misery in 
age, in blindness, in sickness, and in death — a bad state, to 
be lessened and evaded, far as may be, with asceticism and 



106 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

monastic seclusion, and then, at the end, as the final goal and 
last dim solace, Nirvana? No. The Christ who has made so 
many repeated indications of his interest in the race in the 
centuries past — who has fulfilled the pledges of the incarna- 
tion, and the crucifixion, and the resurrection, of the descend- 
ing Spirit in Pentecost, of the overthrow of impenitent Juda- 
ism, of the wars and ruins of old Tyre and Babylon, of the 
decay of the pagan Roman Empire — will he grow weary as to 
the pledges that yet await their accomplishment? History 
has run too faithfully into the grooves of ancient prophecy, to 
make such unbelieving suppositions at all a probability. The 
experience, again, not of the races and masses, not of famous 
cities and venerable governments, attests the Christ as still vig- 
ilant and untiring in his activities. The experience of each 
individual disciple, however ignorant, obscure, and afiiicted, 
who has inown Christ in his nearness to the solitary worship- 
per, is to him a verification of the record. Ilis personality — 
a personality so glorious in its rights, but which the transmi- 
grations and Nirvana of Buddhism deny and would annihilate 
— this personality, in its illumination and renovation, is a viv- 
id and near and home-felt endorsement upon the rolls of 
prophecy. For centuries travellers have attested, by their 
names scrawled or carved, that they had seen with their own 
eyes the Pyramids, so old, solemn, and silent. Back to West- 
ern forests and Saxon-speaking hearth-circles they carried the 
personal memory of this personal sight. And the regenerate 
soul has seen, has known the risen Christ. If he be no reali- 
ty, your constitutions and exchanges and news -boards and 
libraries are no realities. The conscience, calmed by Christ's 
blood, the heart renewed by his Spirit's grace, are his war- 



BVDDUISM. 107 

ranty that every prediction, in its own fit lionr, shall meet 
its punctual and exact accomplishment. The earth ^Yaits 
lier Lord, and each year and hour hurries down his sure ar- 
rival. 

To thinners and scholars and writers of the powers shown 
by Schopenhauer we would accord all due honor. But cer- 
tainly they are not entitled, in the endeavor to rehabilitate 
the Buddhism and the Nirvana of the ancient East, to sever 
summarily the connection which the old Buddhist teacher 
made between transmigration and Nirvana. No man — king, 
sage, or peasant — had a right to expect Nirvana at the hour 
of quitting earth, except at the end of numberless transmigra- 
tions, and as the culminant final reward of a god-like career 
of Buddha-like perfection. It came, perhaps, after ages had 
elapsed, but only to the excellent and passionless, freed from 
sins and stains. To drop the migrations, and precipitate, at 
the end of your single life, the full Nirvana, is to travesty and 
wrong the old Buddhism of India and China. The crown is, 
according to the Eastern faith, for the meek and patient suf- 
ferance, perchance, after traversing the twenty-one purgatorial 
but torturing hells of Hindooism, or the one hundred and 
thirty -six hells of Buddhism,* and knowing personally the 
eight million and four hundred thousand migrations, some of 
them to the fly, and some to the viper, and some to the dog, 
and some to the shark. Is this the refuge — a labyrinth with 
myriads of windings through myriads of ages — to which men, 
in shunning the Man of Sorrows, and King of Glory, and 
Elder Brother born for our adversity, shall betake themselves, 

* Monier Williams, pp. 51, 66, 78. 



108 J?i?l/5 AND CHAltACTERS OF HISTORY. 

if tlie Buddhist or Brarnin alternative prescribed them, as 
something beyond the Gospel and better than Paradise ? 

But there remains beyond this the sad, stern fact that 
Buddhism has not contented the masses. They have supple- 
mented and compounded it. They have found magic, and the 
worship of demons, and sacrifices, as by the Karens to the 
spirits called "Nats," necessary to solace their daily woes. 
True Buddhism denied prayer, but the Buddhism of Thibet has 
its prayers written on strips of paper and attached to little or 
gigantic mills, and each turn of the wheel is a repetition of the 
prayer and a bid for the favor of the powers above. A mis- 
sionary in China recently, Edkins, found the prayer-mill sus- 
pended from the roof of a Buddhist building, so that it might 
turn with the vapor from the spout of the teapot that was to 
sate the traveller's thirst. Other fanes have their one hundred 
and thirty prayer -mills, and each turns a new supplication. 
Grotesque and even brutish as are these revolving supplica- 
tions, turned some by hand, and some by water, and some by 
the roving wind, they cry out against the men of Christian 
nurseries and schools, who refuse a prayer-hearing Jehovah and 
a mediator Christ who ever liveth to intercede for his believing 
suppliants. 

The German thinker Schopenhauer, who has been so strange- 
ly and strongly fascinated by the Nirvana of Buddhism as to 
sever it from its original connection and precedent prepara- 
tions, has also seemed to know sympathy in the shock with 
which Buddha or Gautama discovered, in sickness, blindness, 
age, and death, the miseries of our earthly life ; and, general- 
izing as the Eastern recluse never did, he makes — this German 
teacher — the g-reat thread runninoj throu2;h all our existence to 



BUDDHISM. 109 

be the principle that we turn from wretched to more wretched, 
from bad to worse, in a train of growing and culminant influ- 
ences that stretch in just the opposite course from the opti- 
mism which Leibnitz painted and which Voltaire mocked ; and 
that pessimism — the worst intensified and darkened and poi- 
soned into the very worst, or worstest, were the double su- 
perlative allowed — is the goal of our being. AVhen Latimer, 
old but glad, cheered Ridley at the stake with the hope of a 
candle lighting all England, was not torture, was not shame, 
was not death glorified by Christ's grace into a boon, a joy, a 
benediction ? The Christian has a home and a father's house, 
and a brother waiting with his welcome. The government of 
that sovereign father is not pessimism. The wrath of man 
shall praise him, reluctantly but assuredly. 



110 ERAS AND CHAMACTERS OF HISTORY. 



VL 

WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 

In the vast tLrono* -who watched as the three friends of Dan- 
iel were flung into the burning fiery furnace, bound in their 
coats and hose and so hustled into the flames, because they re- 
fused to bow down to the image of the King set up in the 
plain of Dura, we may imagine was more than one Hebrew 
youth, by ties of kindred or friendship especially attached to 
some one of the victims, and who gazed appalled as the 
flame darted forth from the furnace mouth and his friend fell 
in, while the very soldiers charged with the hurling of the 
victims into the flames were blasted into sudden death by the 
fiery surge. It was the glance of loving despair which such 
youthful Hebrew would send after his disappearing friend, 
never to be seen again. But when the cry came, and the very 
monarch re-echoed it, that the three walked unharmed, their 
bonds loosed, and a form like the Son of God as the fourth 
stood at their side, in the white core of the burning ; with 
what changed feelings would the w^atcher recognize his friend 
when he had emerged, in the unsinged garments wdiich had 
upon them not even the smell of fire! The face of his recov- 
ered martyr would, in his e^es, we may w^ell believe, oft, as met 
again in some Hebrew home or scene of quiet worship, recall 
evermore the thought of that form of awe and power which 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. Ill 

Lad stood beside the sufferer; and wliich had so impressively 
taught Xebuchadnezzar that there was, unseen but omnipresent, 
a sovereign mightier than himself, before ^Yhom the elements 
were loyally submissive. And if that young Hebrew survived 
to old age, and then accompanied the restored captives from 
Babylon to Jerusalem, we may well conceive that the last look 
of the aged Hebrew returning from his long exile, as he left 
the land and capital of the stranger for the land of his fathers, 
would rest, not on the majestic palaces and towers of Babylon, 
but on that crumbled furnace — perhaps a very paltry structure — 
where the God of Israel had so wondrously attested his power, 
and enabled his servants to do — what Nebuchadnezzar's bold- 
est captains and " chief estates "* never ventured to attempt — 
enabled them " to change the word of a king." 

Had these Hebrew confessors died unrescued, their fidelity 
would have, though less wondrous in its miraculous attestation, 
yet not been less noteworthy, when it made conscience tri- 
umph over interest, and caused truth to assert its rights against 
an incensed and uncontrollable despotism. The Christian 
Churches have their many worthies who have thus bravely 
borne and overcome, and who are worthy of perpetual and 
grateful remembrance. We group together three from the his- 
tory of Europe, whose lot was cast at the going out of the 
Middle Ages, and who ventured to change the word of one 
claiming to wield a mightier power than any earthly king — be 
he Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, or Nero — and who went to the 
burning because they so ventured. We place them not in the 
strict order of chronology, for Savonarola was later in time 

* Mark, vi. 21. 



112 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

than Huss ; but there were peculiar influences at work, that 
might have been expected to counterwork the sacrifice of Huss, 
that did not exist in the case of the others, and these peculiar in- 
fluences may better be discussed by considering them apart from 
the case of the other two sufferers of England and of Italy ; 
and such separate consideration will be more intelligible if re- 
served to the close. Such arrangement will have the merit of 
comprehensiveness also, as showing how nations of Europe, 
dwelling far apart, and using distinct dialects, mutually unin- 
telligible, but nations united in one great ecclesiastical polity 
and assembled in its oecumenical coupcils, acknowledged, each 
apart and upon its own soil, the need of reform. But when 
for such reform these sufferers personally contended they were 
struck down, and the attempt was made to consign them to 
perpetual execration and infamy. We know that theirs are — 
like many other eminent names in the history of the Churches 
and of the nations — names that are battle-fields around which 
contending schools yet wage their eager warfare. It is so, in 
British history, with a Becket, a Mary Queen of Scots, a 
Strafford, a Cromwell, and a William of Orange. The exist- 
ence of the dissonance is no cause for silence, but rather 
argument for honest and thorough discussion. Influence, po- 
tent and undeniable, went out with each name, and haunts each 
several grave. The three worthies of Lutterworth, Florence, 
and Prague applied heroically their best powers to right the 
wrong as antichrist had introduced it, and to assert and es- 
tablish the truth as Christ had delivered it. The vastness of 
the odds against which they contended, and their resolute en- 
durance amid peril and obloquy, and death even, commend 
their memory to the regard and gratitude of the race. That 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND BUSS. 113 

they died is no more proof that they failed than Nelson's fall 
at Trafalgar proved the defeat of England's policy, or left any 
way weakened the lesson of his signal hoisted for that battle, 
that England expected every man to do his duty. A greater 
Commander has, by the rugged and blood-clotted engine of the 
cross, ransomed the world ; and has left it in charge that only 
those hating their own lives for his, the Christ's, sake are truly 
worthy of sharing his kingdom and entering his heavenly rest. 
A heathen poet could talk rather unfeelingly of the pleasure of 
watching a storm at sea from some safe height of land, and 
beholding the wreck wrought by the tempest, which for our- 
selves we were not called to encounter. But Christian sympa- 
thy binds us who love the truth to encounter our share of 
reproach, in acknowledging that sympathy, even at this remote 
date and region, with the men who have borne the brunt of 
the common conflict, and commended the common faith in 
darker times and in far lands across the sea. 

More than a century separated the birthdays of Wycliffe, the 
Englishman, and Savonarola, the Italian. Wycliffe was born in 
1324, A.D., and Savonarola in 1452, a.d., thus parted by an in- 
terval of one hundred and twenty-eight years. The English- 
man after a long career died in 1384, and the Italian in 1498, 
the Briton sixty at least, the Florentine worthy but forty-six, 
and the two dying thus one hundred and fourteen years apart. 
But, after sleeping quietly in the chancel of his parish church 
forty-four years, Wycliffe's corpse was dug up by orders from 
the Pontiff for the funeral pyre in 1428. His lifeless remains 
burnt thus but some seventy years before Savonarola's living 
frame was stifled and consumed at Florence. Huss had a 
somewhat briefer career than even Savonarola. Born in 1373, 



114 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

A.D., lie died at the stake in 1418, when but forty-five. He, 
Huss, was but a lad of eleven when Wycliffe died; and he 
sealed his faith with his blood thirty-four years before Savona- 
rola was born, and ten years before the vengeance of Rome 
succeeded in disturbing Wycliffe's tomb and incinerating his 
corpse. The fourteenth century had but begun as Wycliffe 
commenced his mortal career ; the fifteenth was well-nigh com- 
pleted when the worthy of Florence ended his course. The 
career of Huss clasped together the closing decades of the one 
century and the opening decades of the next. 

Wycliffe, as well as being the earliest, was also by far, of the 
three, the most influential on the course of opinion, not only 
in his native Britain, but over the whole continent of Europe. 
Born in Yorkshire, not far from the town of Richmond, in the 
family residence of the AVycliffes, a mansion that has been since, 
down to our own day, a home for Roman Catholics, he studied 
in Oxford, and became early distinguished as a scholar, and 
especially as a logician. In a time when it was the fashion to 
designate great instructors and thinkers by some one epithet 
that was thought to present their marking trait, he was known 
as the Gospel Doctor, or the Evangelical Doctor, from his mas- 
tery of Scripture no less than of the general knowledge of the 
time — even his enemies acknowledging him as an " incompar- 
able schoolman," in their own phrase, and all the contempo- 
rary enmity failing even to impeach his moral character. After 
the victories of Crecy and Poitiers had made the English arms 
famous, not only in France but throughout Europe, much of 
the love of the natives clung to the Black Prince, son of Ed- 
ward in., conqueror in the latter field. The son of this popu- 
lar favorite, the Black Prince, was John, Duke of Lancaster, 



WYCLIFFE, SAVOXAIiOLA, AND HUSS. 115 

and he became the patron of WycHffe in his collisions with 
opponents. Wycliffe early and earnestly denounced the abuses 
of the Mendicant orders and the usurpations of the Romish 
Church. But he was in such esteem for ability and principle, 
that he was employed as an ambassador abroad as well as the 
head of a college at home. As a teacher he awakened great 
enthusiasm in his pupils, and seems early and fearlessly to 
have directed them to the study of the Scriptures. Cited be- 
fore the bishops, he was shielded by the power of the duke, 
his royal patron ; but when the nouse of Lancaster, turning, 
after the death of Edward III. and the accession of the young 
and feeble Richard IL, into enterprises whose aim was to ef- 
fect the deposition of Richard, and to secure for their own 
heir the throne, made terms with the bishops and higher 
clergy for the repressal of all heresy by violent methods and 
by the new punishment of burning, Wycliffe, left thus shorn 
of that former defence, and deprived of his university post, 
did not abandon hope or work because courts frowned and 
martyrdom impended. He retired to his parish of Lutter- 
worth, in Leicestershire, a humble town of but some few thou- 
sand inhabitants, no great distance from that Rugby which 
Arnold's name has made so famous in our own times. Here 
he labored assiduously in the spirit of Chaucer's good parson, 
and sent abroad his " poor priests," as he called them, men 
who, plainly clad in long russet gowns, should traverse the 
country in the spirit, in far later times, of the fellow-laborers 
of Whitefield and the AVesleys. lie denounced the high claims 
of power for bishops, and seems to have regarded as scriptural 
and primitive only presbyters and deacons. A cutting fear- 
lessly down to first principles, and to the foundations of prim- 



116 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

itive Christianity, seems to have been a marked peculiarity of 
his mind. Using the language of the people, his expressions 
were perhaps often misunderstood, and certainly at times wil- 
fully perverted. It was a favorite misrepresentation, current 
then aud in later times, against him that he said " God should 
serve the Devil," a principle which, blasphemous as it is, con- 
tradicts the whole tenor of his numerous writings. It was 
probably the new and alien sense foisted on some pithy sar- 
casm, W'hen he would represent his opponents, the bigoted, 
avaricious, and corrupt priesthood and prelacy, as making the 
interests of the God of truth to subserve and wait upon their 
own selfish interests, as what he would regard as really the 
service on their part of the evil one. When men would per- 
suade or menace him into suppressal of the truth, because it 
impinged on their carnal and corrupt interests, he might with 
his characteristic shrewdness (and in this trait Yorkshiremen 
were never held deficient) ask them if they did not mean to 
have Jehovah don the livery and wait upon the pleasure of 
Beelzebub? And what he thus ironically condensed they 
would report him as commending, and quote his sarcasm on 
their practice as the law of his own. But his grand labor was 
the rendering of the Bible into the language of the people, 
founded on the Latin Vulgate and intelligible to tiller and 
artisan. As printing was not then known, the manuscript of 
the Scriptures was a bulky and costly volume. Many cop- 
ies of his version were destroyed by the persecutors. In- 
deed, there were long periods when the ownership and pe- 
rusal of the volume would bring a man to the prison and 
the stake. But, spite of costliness and peril, so many cop- 
ies of the volume have continued, written at that time, but 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONAMOLA, AND UUSIS. 117 

preserved to our days, that it attests the great influence which 
the Bible thus unfettered won on the national heart. He was 
once lying in Oxford sick, after having been cited by his op- 
posers to attend a synod at Lambeth. In his illness four doc- 
tors and friars were sent by the antagonist party to wait on 
the infirm and, as it seemed, the dying man, hoping in his ill- 
ness to extort a recantation before his death. Beckoning to 
his servants to raise him in the bed, he fixed intently his eyes 
on the visitors, and said, in the language of one of David's 
psalms, " I shall not die, but live" — but, with the keen incisive- 
ness of his nature, he varied the psalmist's words, and where 
the verse stands, " I shall not die, but live to declare the works 
of the Lord," ho, to the confusion of his cowled visitants, ex- 
claimed, " Not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the 
friars." That he did not contemplate either retractation or 
speedy departure was but too evident to his guests, who took, 
confused, their own departure, little comforted with the expla- 
nation that in Wycliffe's eyes "to declare the works of the 
Lord," whom he faithfully and fearlessly served, would re- 
quire his denouncing also the evil and noisome practices of 
their Mendicant orders. He did survive, and to resume his 
work. In the later years he published his " Wycket," or gate, 
directed against the popular doctrine of transubstantiation, and 
directing the inquirers simply to Christ's grace and cross rath- 
er than to outer and corporeal emblems. 

The Providence, which works so strangely by methods most 
opposed to human judgment, made the last six years of the 
great man's life coincident with the breaking out of the great 
Schism of the West, as it is called, and which endured for forty 
years ; the Roman Church being divided by the claims of two 

6 



118 ERAS AND CH ABAC TEES OF HISTORY. 

adverse popes, Urban VI. at Rome and Clement VII. at Avig- 
non. France and some other nations clung to the Pope on 
their own soil ; England, to the Urban in the Italian capital. 

Against the ill -won and ill-used power of the papal see 
Wy cliffe hesitated not to protest, assailing it as antichrist, and 
arguing that if John the Baptist were not worthy to loose the 
latchets of the Saviour's shoes, the antichrist was still less 
worthy to impede the freedom this Saviour had bought for 
his people.* Of course, the papal delegates and the Pope's 
friends were full of fretting and plotting against him. But 
the Roman court found it not convenient to dispense, in that 
day of divided allegiance, with support among the English peo- 
ple ; and Wycliffe and his Bible had too much hold on the 
national heart to make it safe for papal sympathizers or agents 
to seize and sacrifice him. In Rome, Urban VI., embittered by 
opposition and cabal, having seized six of his own cardinals, 
members of his own party, on the accusation of having plotted 
against him, is said to have watched the process of their sub- 
jection to torture on this charge wdiile he devoutly read his 
missal. And then, sewing up in sacks five of them as guilty, 
he ordered their being flung into the sea. If in that day of 
slow intelligence such tidings reached Britain and the remote 
parish of Lutterworth, it is little likely that the effect would 
be to convince the good old reformer that Christ's Church de- 
pended on pontiffs, or that the pontiff so avouching his mis- 
sion and his temper could not be antichrist. He died, being 
struck with palsy in his Sunday services, and was buried among 
his flock. The Queen of England, a Bohemian princess, long 

* " Vaughan," 3d ed., p. 393. 



WTCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 119 

from her virtues and piety known among the people as " tlie 
good Queen," was fond of reading the English Bible ; and, by 
means of members of her household or visitants from her na- 
tive land, the works of Wycliffc reached Bohemia, and were 
there eagerly read, copied, and circulated. 

When the Council of Constance met, a numerous and au- 
gust body, it professed to examine tlie various writings of 
this eminent thinker, and to find in them some savor of he- 
retical errors. It condemned these writings, as found in Bo- 
hemia, to be burnt; and two hundred volumes, some quite 
costly in their style of transcription and binding, went to the 
flames. It gave farther command that the remains of Wyc- 
liffe, which had been long quietly mouldering, should be dug 
np, as not fit to associate, even in death, with Christian men, 
and be consumed by fire. The English Bishop of Lincoln, a 
see that long before had been graced by Grosseteste, a holy 
and faithful teacher, not unlike, in many of his views, to 
Wycliffe, now proceeded to execute the grim charge. Placed 
in the chancel of his church, the reformer's corpse was easily 
discovered, and was burnt ; and then the remains of the 
holocaust were flung to the little stream, the Swift, running 
through the parish. That, as honest Thomas Fuller, the 
Church historian, pithily said long after, carried them to the 
Avon, and the Avon to the sea — a type not unfit of the wdde 
influence that the memory and doctrines of the good man 
w^ere to attain and spread abroad, let synods and pontiffs say 
what they might. 

It was in 1428, or forty -four years after his death, that 
Rome, failing to succeed in her efforts to apprehend and burn 
the living man, did what seemed next worthy to stand for the 



120 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. 

living victim, by sating its enmity and writing its curse on 
Lis coffin and bones. 

Now many of the Ritualists and Iligli- churchmen of our 
own time are slow to acknowledge the full services of Wyc- 
liffe to truth. They do not sympathize with his view of the 
Lord's Supper, or of the episcopal order, or of the authority 
of men and their traditions. The Lollards, who came after 
him, were, many of them, true Christians. Lord Cobham, or 
Sir John Oldcastle, was himself a witness to the death. Ac- 
cused, we think unjustly, of political plots, he was seized and 
condemned to be burnt alive; and, to make his end more 
painful, his body was suspended lengthwise, face downward, 
over the flames, to be slowly stifled and consumed. It is a 
blot on Shakspeare's memory that one of his plays misrepre- 
sents and satirizes this confessor of Christ — a hero, as even 
his enemies allowed. But the popular indignation seems to 
have compelled Shakspeare to the change of substituting Sir 
John Falstaff, as he now stands, for this old Lollard or Wyc- 
liffian sufferer. Suppressed, as for several reigns Lollardism 
w^as, it germinated afresh in the Reformation. 

Jerome or Girolamo Savonarola would have earnestly dis- 
claimed all fraternization probably with the English errorist 
of a former century, Wy cliff e. But this Dominican father 
was a most earnest and devout Christian, and earnestl}'' exposed 
and denounced some of the prevalent corruptions of his time 
and land. Of the Bible he seems to have been an earnest 
student, there remaining to this time no less than four copies 
of the Bible in various libraries of Florence, each with manu- 
script comments from his hand. He was patriot as well as 
Christian teacher, and resisted the covert but effectual usurpa- 



WYCLIFFF, SAVONAROLA, AND IIUSS. 121 

tions of the Medicean family on the old republican institutions 
of Florence. Originally not popular as a preacher, Savonarola 
cultivated voice and style and methods of speaking until he 
became the most popular of the preachers of his city, crowds 
hanging on his lips and clinging to his utterances. In his ear- 
nest enthusiasm he relied on explications of prophecy, and is 
said to liave claimed, from study of the Scriptures and of cur- 
rent and recent history, to have the power of forecasting the 
course of national events. Looking to France and her interven- 
tion for the recovery of Florentine freedom, and rejoicing in the 
temporary overthrow and banishment of the Medicis, he in- 
culcated a wide reform of manners. Ilis friends provided for 
the public burning of books and pictures and works of art 
that he thought inconsistent with Christian purity. But he 
never took the high ground of doctrinal reformation that 
Wycliffe and that Huss, his disciple, had assumed. But 
Florence reverenced his sincerity and saintliness. The with- 
drawal of the French allies, who came with little intent to be 
the enfranchisers he had expected them to prove, and the fickle- 
ness of the populace, and the enmity of the rival order of the 
Franciscans, all gathered darkly around him. He offered by 
one of his monks to undergo the ordeal of fire, each partisan 
passing through a large conflagration. But when his Domini- 
can was to take the host, a consecrated wafer, with him, this 
was denounced as a profanation, and the ordeal was not held. 

The evil Pontiff, Alexander VI., one of the worst of many 
bad wearers of the tiara, endeavored to procure his deportation 
to Rome, to sacrifice Savonarola there. This he refused, and 
claimed the right to appeal from the Pontiff. Measures were 
contrived by emissaries from Rome and his foes at home to 



122 EH AS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

indict and convict him as a heretic. They removed his sacer- 
dotal robes and badges, as emblem of his degradation. The 
bishop officiating declared that he thus removed him from the 
Church militant and also from the Church triumphant. Savo- 
narola replied, "From the Church militant you may, but to 
sever me from the Church triumphant is beyond your power." 
Two of his order, faithful to the last to their loved and saintly 
guide, went to the stake with him. He gave them advice, 
that, like the Master Christ, who went as a lamb dumbly into 
the hands of his murderers, they should endure in silence. 
And he and they so passed. The Unitarian, Roscoe, a man 
who, amid the cares of a large mercantile business at Liverpool, 
cultivated letters most assiduously and successfully, and of 
whose subsequent reverses and the dispersion of his magnifi- 
cent library our own Washinton Irving has written with his 
characteristic tenderness and gracefulness, was a most intense 
admirer of the Medici family. Of Lorenzo and of Leo, the 
Pontiff, he has written biographies which are current and in- 
fluentiah He is severe and by no means, as we think, just in 
his estimate of Savonarola. But McCrie, the learned and exact 
historian, who recovered for John Knox the national and Eu- 
ropean fame of which malignity and oblivion seemed ready to 
strip him, has, in his valuable work on the suppression of the 
Keformation in Italy, taken a much higher and, we think, far 
more equitable measure of the powers and worth of the Italian 
confessor. In matters of theology and ecclesiastical lore his 
judgment far preponderates in weight over that of Roscoe. 
Nicholas Lenau, the German poet, has written a beautiful w^ork 
on the character and story of Savonarola; and the English 
lady, Marion Evans, or Mrs. Lewes, who under the name of 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONABOLA, AND SUSS. 123 

" George Eliot," has written herself for Britain the equal in 
prose of what Mme. du Devant, or " George Sand," has been in 
France, has made Savonarola a prominent figure in her novel of 
*' Romola." In Florence itself his memory is cherished and re- 
vered. His portrait, as drawn by the celebrated painter of the 
same Dominican order, is adorned with the halo of Romish 
saintship ; and to an American scholar, the prior of St. Mark, 
in Florence, spoke, in 1841, of Savonarola as an enlightened 
preacher of repentance and a martyr for a reform on ortho- 
dox principles. He is said to have known the Bible almost 
by heart, and to have stated often that to it he owxd all his 
light and peace. Luther, a lad of fifteen, and Melancthon, a 
babe but one year old at the time of Savonarola's death, when 
their Reformation career began, seem to have approved his hon- 
esty and his piety. Of Alexander YI. Savonarola spoke as be- 
ing but an atheist. The Dominican order, to which the mar- 
tyr of Florence belonged, have repeatedly and even recently 
moved to have him recognized by beatification and even by 
canonization. His record is on high ; and we think, though 
his works show no such appreciation of the great way of salva- 
tion as Augustine and as Martin Luther present it, they yet 
prove him a man of real and fervent piety. But the reform 
that he sought within the Church failed in his hands, and must, 
we think, meet the like result in its renewal on his principles 
within the Church and by the Church itself. Diotrephes and 
the Church which he had bewitched could scarcely be trusted, 
even in the age when John, an imprisoned apostle, yet survived, 
to have wrought out their own purification. The meek de- 
parture of the champion of truth from the propagandists of 
error and the trades in corruption is not schism. It is the 



124 EMAIS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

loyal and indispensable condition of attacbraent to Christ's 
pristine truth ; and in its very severings comes tbe best hope 
of repentance for tbe body tbus renounced and tbe leaders 
thus denounced and disfellowsbipped. 

Jobn Huss bad become, as a student and a preacher, distin- 
guished in bis native Bohemia, and in its great University of 
Prague, Avben the works of Wycliffe came under bis notice. 
He recognized much of the truth they taught, but not all. 
When the works of the Englishman were, in Bohemia, com- 
mitted, with ringing of the church -bells and the singing of 
the " Te Deum," to the flames, notwithstanding the protest of 
the University, IIuss was among the defenders of the English- 
man's memory. Hence, put under the ban, be was called, 
when the sea-pirate Balthazar Cossa was chosen Pope, under 
the name of John XXIII., to Italy to answer. The Bohemian 
King interposed, and friends went instead of the intended vic- 
tim. When the ban Mas renewed, and an interdict threatened 
against any place sheltering him, Huss appealed from tbe Ro- 
man court to the only just judge, Christ. Required by the 
King to leave Prague, Huss did so. Believing, like Wycliffe, 
in a Church invisible, much more select and sacred than the 
visible Church, Huss did not go all lengths with the views of 
Wycliffe, but sought rather a reform in practice than in doc- 
trine. In other words, he would sew tbe new cloth on the 
rents of the old garment — a process which we have the high- 
est and final authority for esteeming as neither economical, 
nor seemly, nor safe. The Emperor Sigismund prevailed on 
John XXIII. to summon a General Council at Constance, one 
of the largest in the number of its attendants, as in their dig- 
nity and rank, that bad been ever convened. Sigismund gave, 



WYCLIFFF, SAVONAROLA, AXD IIUSS. 105 

as Emperor, Lis solemn pledge of safe-conduct that, if Huss, 
leaving his retirement, would attend the Council, he should be 
heard in security, and dismissed safe and unharmed. He came 
and made his defence. When the illustrious prisoner alluded 
to the safe-conduct the Emperor blushed visibly. It was held 
distinctly by this large, venerable body, " representing " — or 
giving, in delegates and authorized representatives, a legislative 
embodiment of the Church universal — that " no faith should 
be kept with heretics." lie was flung into confinement. He 
asked to be allowed the services of a legal advocate. He was 
denied the privilege. " I will," said he, with simple dignity, 
"make Christ my advocate; and soon will he judge you." 
He wrote in his confinement on the Decalogue and on the 
Lord's Prayer, and on other religious themes. At a later ses- 
sion, denied the permission to make his defence, he fell on his 
knees, and there and then commended his case and made his 
appeal to Christ. He implored God's forgiveness of his ene- 
mies and persecutors. When stripped of priestly garb a cap 
painted with devils was set on his head, and with the title 
"Heresiarch" inscribed upon it; while the bishop exclaimed, 
"Now we give thy soul to the devil." "But I," cried he, 
" commend it to thy hands, Christ, who hast redeemed it !" 
He smiled as, on passing out at the church door, he saw his 
books burnt. At the place of execution on his knees he re- 
cited certain of the Psalms, and prayed that by the help of 
Christ and the Father he might patiently endure. Alluding to 
his doctrine, he said, " Therefore am I ready with glad heart 
to die.'* Repeating then the prayer that Christ would receive 
his soul, till the smoke and flame driven in his face ob- 
structed farther speech, his lips were still seen moving. Eras- 



126 ERAS AXD CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

rails said truly, "John Huss was burnt; but convicted he was 
not." 

Now, councils are expected, if anybody on earth should, to 
reform and amend and rule and guide the Church. At this 
very council the presiding spirit was the great theologian and 
Christian of the French nation, and of their University of 
Paris, at whose head he had long been, John Gerson. So de- 
vout a man was he that France long claimed for him what 
Europe outside of France has not allowed, the authorship of 
the " Imitation of Christ," that most popular work, more gen- 
erally attributed to the Fleming, Thomas a Kempis. This 
same Gerson, a very able and a very good man, was yet stren- 
uous in urging the condemnation and death of Huss. Now, if 
councils may claim to represent the collective Church, and in 
that capacity to legislate — a claim which Jansenism made, 
and which Gerson made at this early date, and which Trent 
made, and which the recent Vatican Council of our own times 
has repeated — where were the reforms that this council should 
have given to the Church of Christ ? 

If, again, mystic theology, which has had its very excellent 
and venerable names, and to which the Churches owe many 
holy and stirring volumes, be all that its friends claim for it as 
a cleansing and recuperative power, when could there have 
been a fairer occasion for the display of its remedial and heal- 
ing energies than on such an occasion ? Gerson had gone over 
from scholasticism to the mystic school of religious thinkers. 
He was a great, a brave, a pious man. But the blood of John 
Huss is in part on his robes. The council removed the nefari- 
ous and shameless John XXIII. from the papacy ; but they left 
him in the possession of revenues and ecclesiastical power, and 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 127 

a cardinal not only, but a Bishop of Tusculum, and Dean of the 
Sacred College of Cardinals, to his death. If this be reform, 
what was the contiguous act of the same august and potent 
body — the perfidious betrayal and sacrifice of John Huss — but 
foulest murder? 

The Bohemian people were stirred. Wars sprung up, bitter 
and long. Among the leaders was the one-eyed Zisca, brave 
but stern, and a terror to the imperial and pontifical armies. 
AVben he died he is said, trusting in the terror his very name 
now inspired in the ranks of the oppressors, to have command- 
ed his followers to leave to the beasts and birds his flesh and 
bones, and to flay off and tan his skin and spread it on a drum- 
head, that thus Zisca might still — carried in the van of their 
march — appall their foes. It is said that the grim charge was 
obeyed. Bat, whatever of savagery was shown on either side, 
the fate of IIuss might well stir indignation. Out of the Bo- 
hemian brethren thus roused to incensed resistance came ulti- 
mately in later times the Moravians, who over so many fields 
of heathenism have written so heroic a record, the Ziscas of 
faith and prayer and charity. 

Of the worthies whose story has thus engaged us, it is ap- 
parent, moving, as they did, Europe at three points — insular 
Britain, lettered, commercial, artistic, and republican Florence, 
and the Slavonian people of Bohemia — the greatest, and the 
most abiding, and the most beneficent influence was that which 
came from the endeavor by AYycliffe to reform, not under and 
within the Church, but in the line afterward followed by the 
Protestant Reformation in Britain, Germany, France, Holland, 
and Scotland, apart from the Church. And in all the three 
worthies the great instrumentality of God in enlightening, 



128 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

enfranchising, and impelling men came from the Scriptures. 
Huss translated, but Savonarola, though loving his Bible, 
seems not to have made it vernacular, the possession of the 
nation. In the four portly volumes in which English scholars 
have from many manuscripts reproduced the labors of Wyc- 
liffe himself, and the revised version of his associate and sur- 
vivor. Purvey, we see how fully the old Lutterworth pastor 
found time to redeem his pledge to make the oracles of God's 
word the heritage of the common believer. And in the victo- 
ries of English valor, and of Scottish adventure and heroism, 
in the arts and trades and schools and missions of the British 
islands and the British empire, now girdling the globe, and in 
the reflex and rival influence of their colonists upon our own 
continent, has it been in sympathy with the Gersons, however 
good — much less with the Innocent III. or the Leo X. or the 
Alexander VI. or the John XXIII — or has it been in the track 
of the victims and martyrs — that the English-speaking people 
have reached their present post of freedom, power, and in- 
fluence? 

What constitutes success? Arnold von Winkelreid, when 
he went down gathering into his single breast a whole sheaf 
of spears, and thus breaking the enemy's ranks, was no failure. 
Switzerland exults in his memory. Juggernaut, frownino- for 
centuries from his high car on the myriads of worshippers 
through so many generations tugging at bis ropes, and at inter- 
vals lying down to be crushed under his red wheels, is, after 
all, no success. AVithout conscience, without freedom, with- 
out God's truth known, and God's grace felt as revealed in the 
ransoming Christ, and as witnessed by the renewing Spirit, 
life is but a failure, and death an insufficient refuofe. 



WYVLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 129 

And while man remains, individually, what he is, imperfect 
in this earthly life, and feeble and fallible in his best estate, 
there will be seemino- reverses even in the career of a militant 
Gospel, and in the fruits of Heaven's sowing in some professed 
disciples of a true creed. Judas plotted in the train and 
household of the very Saviour. The apostolic epistles bewail 
an early and wide growth of errors, in and among the first 
nurseries of the doctrine that was to bless all nations. But 
the drawbacks were not the confutation of the message. 

There is an apparent and external unity that but misguides 
and destroys. Revelation warns us against the endeavor to 
cry "Peace" where under the Scriptures and Spirit of God 
there is no peace ; and the Redeemer himself. Prince of Peace, 
as in the highest sense he was and ever is, yet declared that, 
from the very vastness and stubbornness of the evils which he 
came to denounce and to explode, it was his mission " to send 
a sword on the earth." "When, then, the complaint is made 
against the self-denying advocates of righteousness, that they 
disturb society's old investments in wrong, and the venerable 
rustings and incrustings of misrule, and oppression, and fraud, 
and falsehood, the meek response of those who know the truth, 
and follow the Master to the bitter end, is that he has made it 
the ancient wont of his blessed cause to awaken resistance and 
dissent, but that he has also taught his people to believe that 
his word is found, after many delays and even many difficul- 
ties, to assert victoriously its right to a general hearing and 
a final and universal acceptance. AVhy disturb the Church 
with novelties and witness -bearing? Because the very best 
men in the ages gone have borne their lamenting testimony 
that the Church needed disturbing; else she became the prey 



130 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of Satan, and the shrine of Jehovah Avas converted into a mere 
mart of money-changers and a haunt of revellers. It was not 
the Protestant Keformers, so called, who first coined the term 
" Reform," and described it as the crying need of the Christian 
Church. Men like Claude of Turin, and Bernard and Grosse- 
teste and Bradwardine and Gerson had declared its needful- 
ness; and some of them had written treatises on the indis- 
pensable exigency of such measures. But why not, it was 
then asked — why not do all this within the Church, and by the 
Church authorities, and by the pontiffs; and if these pontiffs 
will not heed, then by councils, dictating to such unworthy office- 
bearers, vacating their seats and appointing worthier successors, 
let the Church authorities effect these amendments in the quiet 
of their own body ? But this, too, had been attempted, and 
with what fruit ? The best Roman Catholic authorities unite to 
deplore and condemn John XXIIL, the contemporary of Huss. 
But wdien, in Savonarola's time, the holy see was in the keep- 
ing of Alexander YL, or Roderic Borgia, as was his family 
name, was the cause of virtue or religion in safer, cleaner hands 
than in the days even of John XXIIL? The contemporary 
pasquinades of the Italian city described him, and grave histo- 
rians like Guiccardini and Machiavel have sustained the popular 

cry, as the 

"Alexander who sold altars and the Saviour, 
And Alexander (said they) has a right to sell ; 
For has he not bought them ?" 

What was his son, Caesar Borgia, but a very embodiment of 
all truculence and treachery, upon whom, as upon his living 
model, Machiavel, his contemporary, is thought to have gravely 
shaped his " Prince," the compend which teaches how faith- 



WYCLIFFB, SAVONAROLA, AND IIUSS. 131 

lessness and murder, all fraud, perjury, and violence may be 
indulged in a ruler, if tliiis he secure bis power? ^Yllen in- 
iquity was tbus, by one of the world's great sages in statecraft 
(for such Macliiavel was), made into a law, and pontifical house- 
holds and papal precedents furnished the patterns and " work- 
ing-drawings" — to use the factory phrase — of the terrible 
structure of deceit and oppression, were men, in the name of 
peace, to be charged to keep silence ? The Son of God told 
of emergencies when the very stones would cry out, if men 
renounced their right of free speech for God. Go down to 
later times and trace the development of art in the hands of 
the Medicean family, who had sapped the liberties of the old 
commercial republic of Florence, and then, given John do 
Medici as tenant of the Roman See under the name of Leo X., 
to carry the effect of elegant letters and culture into the cap- 
ital of Christendom, is all done that conscience and God de- 
mand? Savonarola had protested against the usurpations of 
an earlier Medici on the ancestral liberties of Florence, and 
denied absolution to the dying merchant prince unless he re- 
stored them. Was all the glory of the refinement that the 
Medicis brought in, an adequate substitute for the pure Gospel 
and the ancient freedom ? lie, the later pontifical Medici, built 
the Cathedral of St. Peter, the wonder yet of the traveller; 
but be did it by the aid of Tetzel selling the indnlgences to 
the besotted peasants, who believed that in exchange for their 
coin they received the pardon of all sin, and the security of 
the sinning soul. When a man looks round upon the sym- 
metry and costly magnificence and riches and splendor of the 
fane, but remembers that it is both possible and probable 
that souls, by myriads, went down to eternal despair under the 



132 ERAS AND (JHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

false hopes thus peddled out to them, may he not well ex- 
pect, in the indignant language of the Hebrew prophet, that 
the stone out of the wall and the beam out of the timber* 
should accuse architect and pontiff and philosopher when they 
accept such miracles of art, bought by such wages of delusion, 
as a substitute for the one hope, the one truth, the one light 
of the world — the Christ, who scourged traders in doves from 
the old Temple, and may be expected to disown such trading 
in souls and salvation, as the rent-roll of any edifice that he 
accepts as truly his sanctuary ? And when that Medicean in- 
fluence travelled, as it did, out of Florence and out of Rome, 
and Catharine de Medici, a daughter of the house, in the Court 
of France, plotted the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew's- 
day, in which not only Coligny was basely murdered, but sev- 
enty thousand Protestants beside ; when, in that school which 
the French Court under Catharine de Medici furnished, was 
formed the youthful character of Mary Queen of Scots, beau- 
tiful but unprincipled, in adulterous union rewarding her Both- 
well, the murderer of her husband, trying vainly her witchery 
on the stalwart, resolute, and saintly Knox, and perishing on a 
scaffold that, ghastly as it was, was but too well earned — must 
not history declare that piety and freedom had neither in 
Florence, nor in Rome, nor in Paris, nor in Edinburgh reason 
to cherish any peculiar gratitude for the Medicean influence, 
though it did build St. Peter's ? Its Tetzels were worthy of 
the patronage, and the patron was in unison with the peddler, 
who cheated souls in German market towns, and with the as- 
sassins who went through the streets and homes of French 

* Habakkukii.il. 



WTCLIFFE, SAVONAEOLA, AND UUSS. 133 

towns massacring, for the honor of the A^irgin Mary, men, 
women, and children with all brutal atrocity. 

No. All honor to the martyrs who said : AVe have bought 
the truth at Christ's feet, and as his charge and teaching. 
lie earned our souls by the blood of the incarnation and cru- 
cifixion, and his free grace has made us participants and cham- 
pions of a liberty that must be asserted. Traditions, and in- 
dulgences, and purgatories, and masses, and absolutions, and 
confessionals, and inquisitions — they are not his ; and we dis- 
own and renounce and withstand them. And all the order of 
a Puritan and a Covenanter household, which even Burns, little 
submissive as he was to its full teachings, could yet so beauti- 
fully depict in the " Cotter's Saturday Night," was traceable to 
this Christ-given freedom for which old Reformers testified and 
faithful martyrs bled. The rust of their chains, the ashes of 
their stakes, the halters of the gibbets on which they swung, 
all are traceable by the discerning eye as the precedent con- 
ditions — the prerequisite and purchase-money of Puritan in- 
dependence and sobriety and integrity. "We live by the ben- 
efit of these old martyr memories. Smithfield laid the basis 
for Bunker Hill. 

Look again at the influence of God's Bible, as translated 
and diffused through the toil and sacrifice and deaths of these 
brave, holy forerunners. Lechler, a German biographer of 
Wycliffe, declares that the English of Wycliffe's time had the 
Scripture in their own tongue more freely than any other 
contemporary European people. Founded on the Vulgate, his 
version did not, like Tyndale's, founded on the original Greek 
and Hebrew, embed itself so thoroughly on the national litera- 
ture, and character, and history. But Tyndale died a martyr 



134 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

at the stake, and Rogers, the protomartyr under Mary's reign, 
and Cranmer, all had their share in various issues and revisions 
of our existing English Bible. Of its force and beauty even 
Frederick W. Faber, a convert to Romanism, speaks most ad- 
miringly even after his perversion to Romanism. Now, is it 
possible to forget that the book, so widely diffused, so cheaply 
attained — pondered by the sable freedman of the South in his 
hut, worn by the fingers of the Sunday-school child, stained by 
the tears of the grandmother as, having dimmed the glasses 
through which she looks, they drop on the well-thumbed page 
which she loves so well — all this book, so widely spread, and so 
vividly working, is but the outcome of so many layers of con- 
secutive martyrdom ? The men its first translators, its first 
venders, its first readers and possessors even, died the death for 
it. But if the human bearers went, chained at the stake, into 
white ashes for its sake, it — the book itself — lives — lives with 
an imperishable vitality, and it spreads itself with an indefinite 
fertility on every wave of advancing colonization, and with ev- 
ery current of the enterprise and commerce and travel of this 
nineteenth Christian century. Burn the volume-bearers, but 
the volume is itself the inextino-uishable torch of God's lio-htino-, 
the incombustible asbestos into which the providence of God 
has shot the purposes of Omnipotence and the glories of the 
one unchangeable Christ. He, the living, personal, incarnate 
Word ; it, the transcribed, inspired, Christ-telling and Christ- 
guarded word, as written by pen of the missionary and type 
of the printer. 

To make this record popular, accessible, and sovereign, the 
fathers have braved all forms of persecution, interdict, and in- 
quisition. They have, adopting the phrase of the Old Testa- 



WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND IIUSS. 135 

ment as to Daniers worthy compeers, Slindrach, Meshecli, and 
Abednego, dared to " change " not the " word of a king," but 
something that deemed itself more dread and deadly, the word 
of a sovereign pontiff, with the authority of a Christ as he 
claimed behind him, and with the terrors of eternal perdition 
poised in his sovereign hand to smite the heretic and dissident. 
And yet this martyr Bible is in the shop and in the library and 
the nursery-stand, in spite of all adverse efforts, and it is in its 
place to stay. Why ? Because the liberty of the English- 
speaking nations, their practical genius for civilization, and 
invention, and discovery are embedded between the asbestos 
pages of this indestructible record ? No ; for a far higher rea- 
son. Because He who built the worlds with a word, and can 
roll them into flame by a glance, has said that, though this 
heaven and earth at his bidding pass away, not one jot or one 
tittle of his word can pass unaccomplished ; and has com- 
manded the search into the Scriptures. The verification of 
this pledge insures the perpetuity of the book. Its memory, 
if not its text, will travel over into the remotest eternities that 
may lie beyond the Judgment -day. AVhen speaking of his 
care for his earthly followers, however lowly, illiterate, obscure, 
and few, he deigned to say, " Where two or three are gathered 
together in my name there will I be" — the unseen but the 
omnipresent Christ. The believers plead this often as a word 
merely of the future, in their quiet and unnoticed gatherings; 
but is it not also as well a word of the past, no less than of the 
far future? Does it not come from the lips of him, the very 
Son of God, who in the furnace on the plain of Dura made the 
fourth in the fire with the three Hebrews, to complete the 
group? The sympathies of the Christ are retrospective as 



136 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. 

well as prospective. All his kindliness at tlie rustic table of 
Eramaus, and all his wondrous majesty when attending and 
defending the victims of Nebuchadnezzar, come back in the 
just interpretation of his promise that he will cheer his waiting 
assemblies. That ffrace which brouQ;ht Hebrew raartvrs out of 
the fire, but which was not less grace when it left later mar- 
tyrs like Huss and Savonarola in the fire, swathes the book 
with the true elements of indestructibility. That presence, in 
its one sovereign Spirit, shed forth by the Christ, and conform- 
ing to the Christ all his loyal train of followers, is the true 
secret of the unity, and indefeasibility, and final universality of 
Christ's genuine Church. 

Travellers read around the rim of the magnificent dome of 
St. Peter's at Rome, " On this rock will I build my Church." 
We hold no edifice of mason's rearing and sculptors adorning, 
or bearing the name of any mere apostle, to represent aright 
the essential foundation of the Church of the Living God. It 
was the Christ whom Peter, at the time of his Lord's speaking 
the words, had confessed upon whom, as the chief corner-stone, 
all the edifice of true Christianity reposes. It had done so 
from the beginning ; it will remain there only built, there only 
sustained, " till the uttermost bounds of the everlasting hills," 
if we may adopt the language of the patriarch Jacob, dying 
amid the idol fanes of Egypt, but looking beyond the shores 
of the Nile and heights of his old Lebanon to some better 
limit, to describe the refuge and repose of his own departing 
spirit, and the destiny of his well-beloved Joseph. Christ is 
the basis of true faith ; and his eternity is her necessary ap- 
panage. The martyrs looked for this eternity beyond ; and 
so overcame this present world. We thank and bless their 



WYCLIFFB, SAVONAROLA, ASD BUSS. 137 

memory for the lesson ; and the powers, hostile and malio-n, 
which martyred, and prisoned, and tortured, and consumed 
them, only made their memory the dearer, and the heritage 
which they sealed a more glorious and imperishable one. 
Their ashes, as if unworthy to rest on earth, and flung to the 
waters of the Avon, the Arno, and the Rhine, were, better than 
their foes intended it, the omen of the knowledire of the mar- 
tyrs' God covering the earth as do the waters the great deep. 
"I will set," said the Psalmist, prophesying of the Messiah, 
" his (the Christ's) hand in the rivers." The pierced hand of 
the Crucified grasped the streams of Europe by those martyr 
ashes. He will, peacefully or by like martyr sacrifices, do as 
much for all the streams of the Africa, and America, and Asia, 
and far Australia yet to be evangelized. 



138 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 



VII. 

MAHOMETANISM. 

One of tbe strano;est fifjures seen flittinsf across the throno-ed 
stage of the great French Revohition was that of the Baron 
(Prussian by birth, but French in his education, and in his 
adopted domicile) Anacharsis Clootz. The real name of his 
childhood had been Jean Baptiste Clootz. But shedding the 
appellation given to his infancy at the font, as a relic of the 
Christianity that be abjured, he adopted in its stead the name 
of Anacharsis, the Scythian, who in the old classic days of 
Greece had relinquished his native barbarianism for tbe school- 
ings of Athenian philosophy ; and presenting himself as the 
"Orator of the Human Race," to use his own magniloquent 
dialect, the offering which he tendered to the " Goddess of 
Reason," whom the scepticism of the day was installing on tlie 
old altars of a discredited Christianity — the liege gift which 
be proffered, as the expression of his loyal adherence and true 
fealty to the new dynasty — was a treatise that he had published 
in Paris, and which he called " The Certainty of the Evidences 
of Mahometanism." Few readers have, perhaps, ever seen the 
book. The copies that remain moulder, unconsulted and for- 
gotten, on the murky and dusty shelves of libraries. And yet 
the volume is not without its own perverse ingenuity ; and, in 
its author's fond estimate, had adroitness and power. It was 
an attack in flank on the old Gospel, aiming to shoAv that the 



MAH02IETANIS2I. 139 

faith of tlie crucified Nazarene had not more to sustain it 
than had the Koran of the prophet of Mecca ; the certitude in 
both cases was but shadowy and unreal, the merest cloud-land. 
The new deity, whom he and his fellow -atheists proposed to 
enthrone, showed little of the calmness and gravity that her 
title, the "Goddess of Reason," would bespeak; and judging 
from the speedy outbreaks of her votaries, and the influence 
on society and freedom of the age thus proclaimed, instead of 
a sober and queenly reason, the power that ruled had the con- 
tortions and the frenzies of a Sibyl, or the ferocity of a female 
energuraen, foul as a harpy and truculent as the old child- 
slaying Medea. In two years after the solemnity of the en- 
thronization the head of the poor orator, without any loud or 
wide regrets from the race whose spokesman he had become, 
rolled into the basket of the guillotine. Frederick the Great, 
as he was called, ruler of that Prussian land where Clootz had 
been born, but which the baron had left in his early boyhood, 
had died but a few years before this pompous spectacle, which 
the Parisian atheists had framed for the inaugurating of this 
their new goddess; and that crowned scoffer's representation 
to his confidential friends had been, that Moses, Jesus, and 
Mahomet were, each and all, but impostors. Little did baron 
or monarch forecast the course of the literatures, German and 
French ; of the national movements, European and transatlan- 
tic ; and of the influence on homes and governments, and marts 
and shrines, of the fierce tides whose wild rush they witnessed, 
but whose ultimate driftings and deposits they had both of 
them grievously miscalculated. 

Rousseau in their day, and Renan in our own times, sceptics 
though both of them, but each a man of higher endowments 



140 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and more power of language in graving their opinions on the 
mind of after ages, have bequeathed alike their admiring testi- 
mony as to the lofty character and the glorious end of Jesus 
of Nazareth, as presenting the highest embodiment of human 
excellence. 

But the tendency in our own times has been, in the interest 
of quiet and general repose, to devise some method by which 
each of these old faiths may be kept in mutual tolerance, even 
if that quietude lapse into wide and utter apathy or stagnate 
finally into a world-wide scepticism ; leaving the race in its 
ultimate results without an oracle, without a prophet, without 
a creed, without a shrine, and without a God ; no conscience in 
the bosom, no hope irradiating the death-bed, and no outlook 
into eternity. 

Far back as the days of Servetus, whose name is so unhap- 
pily blended with that of Calvin, we find that Arian physician, 
familiar with the Jew and with the Moor, then both in Spain, 
meditating a reconciliation of the adverse and warring faiths 
by relinquishing the deity of our Lord. AYhen in the days 
of the later Stuarts in Britain an ambassador from the Sultan 
visited London, we find from the works of Bunyan and the 
diaries of Evelyn and Pepys what attention it awakened. And 
elsewhere w^e learn that English Unitarians applied then to 
the Turkish ambassador, on the ground of an approximation 
in their views and those of the Mahometans as to the nature 
of our Lord. This w^as afterward denied ; but in a later day 
Charles Leslie, " the reasoncr," as Johnson said tersely, " not 
to be reasoned against," established incontrovertibly the fact 
of the application. So eminent and able an essayist in our 
own times as Richard H. Hutton has spoken of Mahomet as 



MAHOMETANISM. 141 

a true prophet; and an English clergyman, Bosworth Smith, in 
a volume reprinted here, has gone farther, and claimed for Ma- 
homet that he was not only a true prophet, but the greatest 
of prophets next after our Lord Chrit>t. Douglass of Cavers, 
a sounder thinker and a riper scholar than either, has drawn 
a just distinction that there are two periods in the career of the 
prophet of Mecca. In the first he was an earnest witness of 
the divine unity ; but in the latter he was a forger and a false 
prophet. 

There was much to win admiration in some of the personal 
traits of Mahomet — his simple habits, his accessibility and 
affability, his perseverance, his generosity, and his close attach- 
ment to early friends; and, looking at these, modern writers 
have been loath to recognize the base alloy found in some of 
his dealings and principles. Even our own Irving, in his view 
of the prophet, would lean to the more kindly judgment. Yet 
Scripture and common-sense alike remind us that, in the same 
individual, may be unhappily blended traits most dissonant; 
the w^orse of which come out only in peculiar temptations, and 
at certain periods and stages in the career. Benedict Arnold 
had in his early days as a patriot high and rare valor. It did 
not render impossible or incredible, much less innocent, the 
treason of later days. That Judas had been selected by the 
Master, who knew all men, to be an apostle, did not forbid his 
lapsing into apostasy and treason and attempted Deicide. And 
so, in the older pages of the Bible, the magnificent and inspired 
predictions of Balaam did not forbid his aiding idolatries of 
Baal-Peor that would fain counterwork in Israel the blessings of 
the God of Israel, and did not save him from perishing in the just 
vengeance that overtook the sin which he aided in provoking. 

7 



142 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

The complex character of the Arab seer is to be steadily 
regarded, if we would form a just estimate of his purposes and 
his after influence, as compared with the nature and the results 
of the Jewish and Christian systems. It is a singular and 
unimpeachable verification of a very ancient prophecy that, 
under the tent of the one Abraham, of the seed of Shera, there 
were gathered together the ancestors of the Moses, the great 
law-giver of the Exodus and of Sinai ; of that Messiah of the 
tribe of Judah whom we of the Christian Church hold the 
one Hope and Saviour and Judge of the race ; and also, wheth- 
er we take the race of Ishmael or that of the sons of Keturah 
as that of Mahomet's nearest ancestry, the progenitors of the 
man and people who first transcribed and received the Koran, 
the book of the Moslem. Far back as the days of the Deluge 
it had been announced that the seed of Japheth should dwell 
in the tents of Shem. Taking the influence of the Law, the 
Gospel, and the Koran on Europe and far eastern Asia over 
the widely dispersed and variously trained progeny of Ja- 
pheth, how wondrously and numerously have the seed of Ja- 
pheth thus clustered in the shadow of the tent -curtains of 
Shem. 

The early writers in the Christian Church have been 
charged, as Prideaux and Maracci, with painting too darkly 
the motives and career of Mahomet; and for many years 
their statement that he was afilicted with epilepsy, and that 
he took advantage of the ecstasies thus induced to affect su- 
pernatural inspiration, has been contradicted. Yet so modern 
a writer as Renan, with no Christian proclivities, speaks of 
Mahomet as from childhood epileptic, and declares that it 
" made his fortune." Left early an orphan, he had the guar- 



MAHOMET A MS jr. 143 

diansliip of a generous uncle, but knew the disadvantages of 
poverty. By liis fidelity to her business interests he attracted 
the favor and won the affection and hand of Khadijah, a Avid- 
ow, much older than himself, but to whom he was a kind and 
devoted husband, cherishing after her death her memory with 
a grateful and loyal fidelity. But in the excitement of grow- 
inor ease and afiluence he was not at ease in his heart. lie 
needed and affected solitude. And in some of these seasons 
of prolonged meditation and prayer his sadness so grew that 
he meditated suicide, but was restrained, as he supposed, by 
the angel Gabriel. 

There may have lingered yet, in certain nooks of Arabian 
and Syrian society, some of that patriarchal religion which 
shone forth so beautifully in the character of Job, the patri- 
arch of Uz, and that had in Melchizedek, the sheik of Salem, 
so glowed and blessed all around, that Abraham himself ac- 
cepted gratefully and reverently the benediction of this lonely 
and devout seer. In the age of Mahomet's birth both Jews 
and Christians had become greatly perverted by idolatry and 
by superstitious traditions and practices. The idolatrous shrine 
of the Caaba, where Mahomet's ancestry had worshipped, was, 
as some suppose, the construction of Jewish exiles of the tribe 
of Simeon, who had, in their Arabian isolation, gradually been 
swayed to paganism. The solitary musings of the young trad- 
er and recluse may — in the close study of his own heart, in the 
protests of a conscience often burdened and seriously ponder- 
ing, and in the monitions of that Divine Spirit who, as the Bi- 
ble assures us, is not far from any one of us — have drawn Ma- 
homet toward influences that would, duly cherished and obey- 
ed, have won him heavenward, and rekindled somewhat in his 



144 ERAS AND CE AH ACTORS OF HISTORY. 

lonely spirit of the graces of an Enoch and a Melchizedek. If 
such the impulses on one side, they were not the only feelings 
that struggled for domination within him. Mahometan tra- 
dition represents him as having in early youth had his side 
opened, and an angel, removing the heart, squeezed from it 
the black blood, the focus and centre of evil influences, and 
then replaced it, after it had been thus cleansed, within the 
youth's bosom. From ambition and self -consciousness and 
spiritual pride that heart was certainly not cleansed. 

The possibilities of great good soliciting on the one side, 
and the temptations to great error and misguidance alluring 
on the other, may be indicated in the imagery of the ninth 
chapter of the book of the Apocalypse, which for so many 
centuries the Christian Church has held as rightfully applied 
to the career and influence of this religious guide. A star is 
seen falling from heaven : some read this plunge of the fall- 
en luminary as applicable to the times of his entrance on 
the world rather than to himself. They say it describes the 
growth of saints' worship, and idolatry, and worldliness, and 
corruption in the Christian Church. But others read in it the 
imagery in which God presents the aspirations to truth and 
righteousness which his Spirit had enkindled in this young 
recluse, as contrasted with the unhappy deflection from that 
upward career — a deflection to which earth and Satan allured 
him, in his ambition and pride and sensualism. 

The great changes of society proceed not always from the 
noble and the mighty, but from quarters often given over to 
obscurity and neglect and despair. The miner's son, Martin 
Luther, could little suggest to the school-mates and teachers 
and patrons who early knew the lad the possibilities of his 



MA IIOMETAXISM. 145 

future career. Guttenbcrg and Columbus were of ordinary 
mould, as men judged them; but how much did Providence 
propose for them and achieve by them ! It was tlie magnifi- 
cent purpose of the world's true Deliverer, to begin his great 
work for the evangelization and enfranchisemiCnt and elevation 
of our race, not only among but by the classes whom the des- 
f»ots of old counted but as mortar, to be trodden down ruth- 
lessly under their coursers' hoofs and the tires of their chariot- 
wheels. It was the same ignoble class at whom infidels of 
later days have scoffed, as being but like the slugs in their 
gardens, little worthy of remembrance, much less protection. 
Man's gracious Maker has quite other standards of reckoning. 
"To the poor" was distinctively and eminently the preaching 
of his Gospel. By fishermen and tent-makers he moved upon 
the camps, the schools, the marts, and the thrones of the na- 
tions. Thus would he upheave the society which philosophers 
could dazzle and which sovereigns could subdue, but which nei- 
ther philosopher nor sovereign could reform from their vices 
or calm in their sorrows. He chose the poor to teach and to 
free and to exalt all layers in the entire mass of mankind. 

But Mahomet, even with the advantages of so wondrous a 
lesson spread out before him, was too dull and too earthly- 
minded to think of treading the same path. His work of re- 
form was by the sword. The steeds of his native Arabia were 
to supply the cavalry that in the early age of Saracen prosely- 
tisra and conquest played so dread a part in gathering in the 
Moslem harvest. The Koran went out, and its messenger was 
a rider and a sword-bearer ; death or Islam was the stern alter- 
native for the races approached. Of old the Christ had said : 
" He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." So 



146 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

does it by the purpose of liim, the world's Ruler, remain a 
principle embedded in the nature and the destiny of man that 
the military power which first by the sword propagated this 
false creed shall one day, when crossed by a stronger sword, 
fail to retain the territory thus won. In blood of battle and 
victory it first came ; in blood of battle and defeat it will 
finally wane and go out. 

There were elements of moral truth and even of divine 
right on the side of the Arabic innovator. He denounced, 
loudly and fiercely, the image-worship and the saints-worship 
of the apostate Churches, both the Greek and the Roman. 
They had quietly adopted, as by a Christian sanction, much of 
the old paganism. And the God, who will not give his glory 
to another, gave his commission to this military fanatic to be 
the plague of the communities nominally Christian, which had 
so fearfully and widely paganized themselves. The Mahom- 
etanism that once threatened the rest of Europe from Spain, 
and that was checked by Charles Martel ; that in later days 
assailed Europe in the siege of Vienna, and was rolled back by 
John Sobieski ; that had appropriated Palestine and Constanti- 
nople ; and that so long and so recently, on the southern coast 
of the Mediterranean, by a bold piracy defied and plundered the 
commerce of Christendon, and that has, in Persia and the Mo- 
gul empire of India, been once so menacing and so gorgeous — 
had in a certain sense its impulse of vengeance and devastation 
from Him who will not overlook forever the worship of human 
saints, of graven and painted images, and the coinage of 
legends and devotions that wear his name and never once had 
his warrant. 

This false system had another dread element of power in its 



MAIIOMETAXISM. 147 

steadfast recognition of a divine, overruling Providence. When 
one of their great warriors and rulers held up the torn treaty 
which a Christian sovereign had made with him, and which 
that Christian potentate had faithlessly violated, and appealed 
to the God of truth to vindicate the right and to punish the 
wrong-doer, it was but a putting forth of the omnipotent equi- 
ty, that the defeat was in that battle for the nominal Chris- 
tianity that had been perfidious. Along with much of its foul- 
est error, Mahometanism has clung tenaciously to the great fact 
of divine predestination and sovereignty. Against the idol and 
the relic and the legend, this belief in an all-swaying destiny 
was no futile or contemptible antagonist. And the individual 
or the community who persistently hold this great truth is like- 
ly to develop a consistency and a persistency that must be felt. 
But, on the other hand, how little did the Arabian seer nn- 
derstand the right or the worth of the household. Our Saviour, 
in his early protest against the facility of divorce among the 
Hebrews of his own time, said plainly that Moses had permit- 
ted to the hardness of the Jewish heart what had not been the 
law of creation. So Samuel, when warning his people from 
envying and adopting the regal government of their pagan 
neighbors, foretold that, beside the conscription of military ser- 
vice, they would find concubinage and polygamy among the 
paraphernalia of royalty. It was on man's part human wilful- 
ness, forewarned, but then indulged ; and punished in the suc- 
cess with which it sought to better on God's arrangements ; as 
in the Saviour's parable the younger son had his heritage and 
his travel, and was left among swine and husks as the goal of 
his freedom and the fruit of his riot. Christ, as the greater 
Master whom Moses predicted and Samuel served, tracked back 



148 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

the law of marriage and the household past the intervening 
perversions to the original platform as God made it and meant 
it. When, in the age that had uttered and that recorded the 
words and deeds of the New Testament, Paul's Master found a 
divorced wife, llcrodias, on a Galilean throne, and Paul found 
a divorced Agrippina on an imperial throne, the rank of the 
offenders did not modify, in the apostle or the apostle's Mas- 
ter, the stern simplicity of the law of the home as God gave it 
and as man must obey it. And yet, after all this emphasis of 
legislation in that Christ whose divine mission he professed to 
revere, Mahomet went into all license and shamelessness, and 
forgetting the memory of his own generous and loyal Khadijah, 
the patroness of his youth and poverty, he made the thronged 
harem the privilege of himself as prophet, and represented the 
liouris as part of the glory of the Paradise awaiting all true be- 
lievers. "What God had put together in the sanctity of house- 
hold life this self-constituted seer ventures to put asunder. The 
guarded and orderly family constitute the primary atom, in 
all true reform for the nation and for the race. The Moslem 
system virtually disintegrates and rots this first constituent 
element — this primary atom. When God formed our first 
parents he taught that even the parental claim, early and holy 
as it was, should in the derivative households fall behind the 
conjugal right, and a man should even leave father and mother 
if thus only he could cleave to his wife. The Koran, in its re- 
casting God's primitive law of marriage, usurps on God ; and 
God's Providence is bound to set aside the usurper and his 
usurpation. The delays of retribution do not leave the wrong 
to outlaw, by mere lapse of time, the banished right. There 
is no real laches in Heaven. 



MAUOMETAXISM. 149 

The false religion and its myriads of fanatical adherents 
may have a terrible errand as against a corrupt Christianity. 
Two great nominal sections of Christendom — the Greek and 
the Roman, one on the Bosphorus and the other on the Tiber — 
had each gone far apart from the pristine simplicity and spirit- 
uality, and become largely antichristian. In their secular pow- 
er they were mutually envious and hostile. And it was, in a 
good degree, the profound hatred of the religious body seated 
on the ruins of the pagan empire at Rome toward the rival re- 
ligious body, seated on the site of the Eastern Roman empire 
at Constantinople, which left the latter capital, unrelieved by the 
crusades and by the pontiflE, to fall before the Turk. The Ori- 
ental had little share in the sympathies of the Occidental ; and 
the antichristian divergencies of both, from the first law and 
spirit of Christ, swept them into bitterest alienation from each 
other as well. As against the falsehoods and corruptions of 
both, Mahometanism was, in its own way, an instrument of 
divine venixeance. But this commission from on \n<A\ to 
waste was not an endorsement of the creed of the commis- 
sioned waster, any more than Jehovah's call of Nebuchadnez- 
zar to chasten the surcharged guiltiness of throne and dese- 
crated fane at Jerusalem was, by any just implication, an en- 
dorsement and consecration of the o-olden imacje reared in the 
plain of Dura, and for which the Chaldean King required the 
worship that Shadrach and his fellows righteously and heroic- 
ally refused. 

The flagrant vices which, in our later ages, have been fos- 
tered in the very bosom of a dominant Mahometanism are 
among the tokens that its term of vindictive, avenging punish- 
ment against a corrupt and effete Christianity nears its end. 



150 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Like Belsliazzar's riot, preceding the Median occupancy of tlie 
Chaldean city, the unchecked revel of guilt seems calling for 
an overthrow, sudden, and as final as sudden. 

At such a time the project of some thinkers to effect for 
Christianity an accommodation — a mutual compact of toler- 
ance, nay, even fraternity — is a league absurd in its principles, 
irreverent to the Heaven and the Emmanuel who must be in- 
voked to protect it, and sure of an accursed fruitage could it 
be once established. When the startled apostles on the mount 
of transfiguration suggested the rearing of booths for the two 
old prophets, they yet loyally proposed that the first should be 
for their Master, the recognized Christ, recognizing his divine 
priority even amid their bewildered fantasy. But a scheme to 
bring the Koran of Mahomet into copartnership with the Old 
Testament and the New, and to place the sword of subju- 
gation and massacre on the shield of the new league, athwart 
the Cross of divine self-sacrifice, as kindred emblems, is pre- 
posterous to the utmost verge of irreverent impiety. It would 
be to the full as wise, and it would not be as grossly undevout, 
to propose that Enoch, who " was not, for God took him," 
should be brought down from Paradise to make peace with 
Judas, by dividing the thirty pieces betwixt the patriarch and 
the deicide,. and by rearing on the field of Aceldama a two- 
faced monument of peace and accord. As a record of better 
feeling, each of the twain having " gone to his own place," the 
one side of the monument should bear a chariot, emblem of the 
ascended, and the other side a halter, emblem of the descend- 
ed. The men of a later liberalism, who would blend Tophet 
and the New Jerusalem into one common pledge of good-fel- 
lowship, are like the builders on the plains of Shinar of the old 



MAHOMETAXISM. 151 

tower of Babel, and are sure to thrive as well in their tower- 
ing project as did the old-world schemers. 

If any be faint-hearted in viewing the long duration and the 
wide diffusion of false forms of religion, let us remember, in 
the collision between Mahometanism and Christianity, above 
all other advantages, the unspeakable, the unapproachable su- 
periority that belongs to the Bible, as weighed against the 
Koran in its own contents and spirit. The high poetic style 
of the Arabian volume is, in the esteem of its writer, Mahomet, 
and of its admiring Moslem students, the standing miracle — 
standing by their confession alone — but in its singleness suf- 
ficient and unanswerable to prove its divine origin. ]]ut, as 
they confess, it is untranslatable from its Arabic original into 
other of the earth's dialects, with any adequate retention of its 
peerless felicities of expression. Now, the Bible, its rival, suf- 
fers no such drawbacks, from its adaptation to the lips and 
ears of another tribe, in the far West, or in the frozen North, 
who know nothing of the deserts where Mahomet received his 
mission and his message, and who know as little of the Egypt 
or Palestine where the prophets and evangelists were inspired 
to record their testimony. It, beyond all comparison with its 
Moslem competitor, can talk with the Brahmin, the Bengalee, 
and the Esquimaux or the red Indian of our own continent, 
and retain in all these new dialects its simplicity and majesty 
and picturesque variety and touching naturalness. No candid, 
dispassionate reader of the Koran can overcome the sense of 
its general tameness, its monotony, and its repetitions. Where 
are its parables, like those in the four Gospels — where its psalms 
— where its idyls of pastoral beauty like the book of Ruth or 
the story of Joseph — where its terrible portraitures of battle 



152 ERAS AND CHARACTEHS OF HISTORY. 

and devastation, of deliverance and victory — where its high dis- 
coursing on gravest, loftiest doctrines — where its earnest and 
simple and daylight statements of in-door and out-door ethics 
— where, above all, its loftiest prophecy of the coming fates of 
the nations, and its clear, pure, and vivid presentation of the life 
beyond the tomb and the resurrection morn ? 

See, again, the terrible voids and shadows as of tangible 
gloom and pathless despair that rest upon the pages of Ma- 
homet's book, when you carry thither the grand question, 
How shall man be justified and renewed? "How shall man be 
just with God ?" It has no propitiatory victim, no blood of 
the sprinkling of the great Passover Sacrifice, that bans the 
visit of the destroying angel, and speaks security and seals sal- 
vation, by the Lamb of God taking away tlie sin of the world. 
The Christ of the Bible said to his foes, " When I am lifted 
np, I will draw all men unto me." How lofty the promise in 
its vastness of scope ; and yet, to mere human judgment, how 
impossible its fulfilment. Yet when Greek art and culture, in 
Herod ; and Hebrew tradition, in chief priest and Sanhedrim ; 
and when Roman law, by the reluctant hand of the protesting 
Pilate ; all turned their spears against the meek and unresist- 
ing victim, as they hung him up between earth and heaven, the 
iinresistino; and intercedino' oblation — even thouo-li Heaven too 
seemed deserting its gift and its representative, and he cried, 
" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" the spears 
of all human doom and the clouds of all celestial desertion 
but spoke the singleness and the solitariness of the combat on 
the sufferer's part. And when the gloom burst, and the cry 
came, " It is finished," it was no longer a dubious result be- 
tween good and evil — a drawn battle : leaving the conflict in- 



MA IIOJfETAXISJf. 153 

definitely postponed. The single propitiation bad a divine ef- 
ficiency, and shed forth an eternal virtue. The lifting up, so 
met by the victim, was itself the precursor, apt and sure, of the 
resurrection of the Victor, soon to follow — of the ascension, 
and of that divine enthronement and of that universal empire. 
The suffering Lamb had put on again tlie full Godhead, and 
out of the cross and tomb and ascension looked down on an 
enfranchised earth and a ransomed race ; the Lion of the Tribe 
of Judah, the Captain of our eternal salvation, and the winner 
of a grace that made hell quail, and that cast wide open the 
gates of a restored Paradise. 

Then put, as against the victories that Mahomet won by the 
sword, the triumphs more spiritual and permanent that Christ 
bequeaths to his people, as the witnessing, suffering, and mar- 
tyred but indestructible Church. See what the world would 
liave lost had the fate of Jesus been what Mahomet made it — a 
bodily escape for the Prophet of Xazareth, and the substitution 
in his place of Judas, the arch-traitor caught in his own toils. 
Would his craven and poisoned blood cancel sin in the peni- 
tent, and seal grace to the waiting disciples in their assemblies 
and their ordinances? The Resurrection, then, would have been 
a mocking delusion, with no reality in history and no virtue in 
morals. " Touch me," said the true Christ to the doubting 
Thomas, and " probe hands and side." If Mahomet were to be 
trusted, the only side torn and the only hands transfixed were 
the ribs and heart of the felon who sold for thirty pieces of 
silver his Master, and the only palms actually wounded that 
Thomas was to manipulate and grasp were those into which 
the Sanhedrim, while scorning the poor miscreant, had dropped 
with ill-veiled disgust their paltriest bribe. These the hands 



154 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

to sway the sceptre of a universal dominion. This the being 
to wield all power in heaven and in earth. A sad outlook for 
the race and for the universe, if so very a caitiff as this Iscar- 
iot Judas, with Satan entered into his heart and thirty dirty 
coins in his gabardine, were all our dependence, and the Church 
of all after times w^ere bidden to look upon the wretch and say, 
"This is ail our desire," and Thomas were but bewitched as he 
cried, " My Lord and my God !" to so base a counterfeit of the 
world's one hope and Redeemer. 

But, again, though Mahomet himself disclaimed prophecy as 
being part of his prerogative, the traditions of Persian Ma- 
hometanism at least represent Mahomet, in his journey to 
heaven, as receiving the prophecy that the Christ was to re- 
turn in years yet future to our world, to remain here some 
forty years, or, as other versions of the prediction have it, but 
some twenty-four years, and then to encounter and overcome 
the antichrist, and also to rout the forces of Gog and Magog, 
which in such Mahometan tradition play hereafter so impor- 
tant a part in the world's history, as they do in the predictions 
of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse in Patmos. Now, according to 
Mahometan tradition, after these forty or twenty-four years of 
a renewed earthly career, the Christ is to become a Mahometan, 
and to receive at Mahometan hands a burial, with the Mahome- 
tan prayers for the dead over his, the converted Christ's, grave. 
Where, in the wildest romances of the "Arabian Nights," are 
there stories so degrading, so intrinsically improbable, and so 
flagrantly preposterous as this predicted descent of Jesus, to 
accept, after some forty years of terrene conflict, a Mahometan 
conversion and a Moslem entombment ? If Mahomet gave 
such expectations to his followers, and presented them as oracles 



2LUI0METANISM. 155 

received by him, the favored prophet of Mecca, in his night's 
journey to the highest heavens — beyond, as he claimed, the 
heavens tenanted by Christ himself — he, the utterer of such a 
fable, betrayed the invention and authorship of Satan, in 
legends so loftily impious and so astounding in their prepos- 
terous inconsistency. 

But remember that, beside the Book and the Master of the 
kingdom, who is the theme as well of that book, the world and 
the Church have his, the Master's, promise of the Paraclete, the 
Holy Spirit leading his people into truth and ministering spir- 
itual illumination and strength, and all holy desires and all 
blessed and divine principles. 

The Church has through successive ages pleaded this great 
prediction ; and has she, upon earnestness and obedience, ever 
lacked new verifications of the old warranty? Pentecost, and 
the Reformation, and modern missions, and modern revivals, 
and all abiding national reforms and upheavals, have come di- 
rectly in the train, or indirectly in the remote wake, of such 
prayer for the Spirit. And when Christ, as if to guard as with 
special majesty and sanctity the theme and hope so momentous, 
has warned that all sin might be forgiven to the penitent, sin 
against Father, and sin against Son, but not sin against this 
Holy Spirit, how fearful and lurid is the light cast from this 
context of Scripture upon the pretences of the Meccan prophet, 
when he and his followers claim to make a change in the vow- 
els of the Greek word, using " Periclyte " for Paraclete — the 
" Glorious " for the " Counsellor, Comforter, and Advocate " — 
and when the Arabian seer and his followers, thus perverting the 
genuine and original Greek term, find the equivalent and redu- 
plicate of Mahomet's own Arabic name, "The Illustrious;" and 



156 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

■when they presume tlius to confound liim, the polygamist and 
the assassin, and the truculent butcher of the seven hundred Jews 
that would not accept him — to confound him, steeped in lies, 
and blood, and sensuality, with the sinless and divine Spirit of 
God, is there not, on the part of the pretender making such 
claims, a perilous acceptance of the sin which is pronounced by 
the Christ himself to be irremissible, for whose blackness there 
is no cancelment, and against whose venom Heaven itself 
yields no hope of balm in this world or the world to come ? 

When, then, we see, in the light of the atonement by the 
Cross and the regeneration by the Holy Ghost, the only charter 
of hope for the race, according to New Testament oracles, we 
may not accord the name of divine to the Koran, which lacks 
these holy influences so utterly, and which travesties these 
great boons so hideously. And when essayists like Ilutton 
and when lecturers like Bosworth Smith claim for Mahomet 
the honors of a true prophet, and the latter (Bosworth Smith) 
places him as the greatest of prophets next after Christ, leav- 
ing Abraham and Moses and David and Elijah all his inferiors, 
can we, with any loyalty to the great Teacher himself, thus ac- 
cord rank to one who, like the seer of Mecca, makes our own 
Emmanuel's death a mere dodge, entrapping Judas and leaving 
for the race no blood on the cross but that of the wretched 
Iscariot ? 

What are the prospects, with the wide currency that Ma- 
hometanism has won, that it can be subverted ? Or can it be 
taken away w'ithout bloodshed ? The probabilities are, from 
the past history of the race, that what w^as sown in violence 
will perish by like methods over large portions of the field. 
" He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." And 



MAHOMETAN ISM. 157 

yet, by mctliods wliicb we cannot forecast, God may so pre- 
cipitate great social changes as to make the transition from 
error to truth more quiet and more rapid than ^ve now im- 
agine. 

But tlie age, it may be said, is absorbed in great questions 
of merely material and physical well-being; and the predomi- 
nance of infidel theories in lands nominally Christian, it may 
be said, forebodes no strength for the Church of Christ in the 
impending collision. AVe read not the auguries of Providence 
thus, if the histories of the past furnish any safe parallel for 
the anticipations of the future. God has allowed great inroads 
of error, often only to exhibit more impressively the truth of 
the Bible statements as to human perverseness and ingratitude ; 
and then, when secular allies and helps all failed, the Church 
looked up in prayer, and the Spirit came down from the Head 
of the Church in might and speed to answer the prayer and 
meet the emergency.* And now, as of old, God allows the 
offerinsrs and schemes of his own true servants to incur loner 
delays in success, and to meet what seems widespread and 
irreparable disaster. When Elijah, standing alone, carried his 
solitary appeal on Carmel, against the hundreds of Baal's 
servitors, to the old Jehovah of the Exodus and of Sinai, the 
prophet, to show that no human art or collusion was on his 
side, drenched profusely with water the sacrifice and the altar 
where it lay. When the fire came down on the wood water- 
soaked and the victim dripping from the floods poured over 

* And Unbelief, as when Elisha predicted the plenty following the siege 
and the famine, is crushed in the gate where she stands cavilling, by the 
rush of the sudden deliverance. 



158 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

it, the multitude cried, "The Lord he is God." The God of 
Elijah pursues at times in modern days the policy of his old 
loyal servant on Carmel. lie allows tlie craft and enmity of 
earth, and hell to shed down not only doubt in its damp fogs, 
but agnosticism or materialism in its fierce down-pour, to come 
alike on oracle and creed and offering. On the heart of Eu- 
ropean Christendom there came down the rain thick and fast 
of a mocking deism or a truculent atheism. But a Robe- 
spierre even soon found it necessary to recognize again a Su- 
preme Being, and a Napoleon to exclaim, as he pointed the 
doubters to the starry sky, "Who, gentlemen, made all these?" 
On Germany, nominally Protestant, came down torrents of Ra- 
tionalism, in her colleges and her pulpits and her synods. 
But the Spirit of God came down in the season of national 
distress and invasion, and Prussia soon felt that she needed 
the God of her fathers. And so, in Christian Britain and Chris- 
tian America, should an irreligious monsoon set in, we can 
look up, believing that tlie God of our fathers can enkindle 
the fire again on the altars from bis own dwelling-place, high 
beyond and above all these renewed and violent tempests. 

The Bible Societies, and translations, and the missions and 
tracts and Sunday-schools of our age, go to a power like that 
which sent fire into the soaked and thrice-drenched offerings 
of Carmel. Ask a Herodian or a Pharisee, in some wealthy 
mansion of Jerusalem, on the nigbt of the Advent, the auguries 
.for good, and he would have told you that the principles of 
the intelligent and affluent classes in the Hebrew city left then 
little or no reason to expect any great changes, as impending 
or as even remotely possible. But sucli respondent, though 
familiar with the counsels and policy of Herod and the Sanhe- 



MAHOMETANISM. 1 5 9 

drim, might find perchance that he was not equally conversant 
with the methods and policy of Iliui who sittcth on high to 
pour contempt on princes, and to turn the wisdom of earth, 
vaunting, self-reliant, and God-defiant, into a sudden and 
thoroucrh conviction of its own nothinixness. 

The most heedless survey of the state of the world two 
centuries back, as compared with its present condition, shows 
a vast change as to the relative power of the Moslem people 
and faith. God has not relaxed in his patronage of the Bible- 
reading and Bible-giving nations of the world. They it is 
who lead the world's commerce, its colonization, its freedom, 
and, to a large extent, its literature and its science. Tlie Chris- 
tian sovereign of the British isles is this day ruler over a larger 
Moslem population than can be claimed for the Sultan of 
Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Khedive of Egypt. If the 
Christians of the English-speaking lands have but faith, and 
the prayers of faith ascend from closet and sanctuary to an 
unforgetting Christ and to the untiring Paraclete, the result is 
neither dubious nor distant. Because the Emmanuel of God 
is "the Truth," and liis omnipresence and almightiness floods 
the entire scene of present collision, and as well also, perchance, 
of future conflict, it is as sure as the return of day and the 
revolutions of the seasons, that the errors which have advent- 
ured to impugn and to counterwork that Truth must go down. 



160 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 



VIIL 

THE CRUSADES. 

Few sentences have been more praised and cited, in the 
■whole rano-e of Eno;lish literature, than those of Johnson when 
reciting his visit to the Hebrides : " Whence," as he says, 
"savao;e clans and rovin^y barbarians derived the benefits of 
knowledge, and the blessings of religion. . . . Far from me, 
and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may con- 
duct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has 
been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is 
little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon 
the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would*not grow warmer 
among the ruins of lona." A contemporary of Johnson, Sir 
Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, fond alike of 
good cheer and exact science, and less likely to be overcome 
by mere sentiment, was yet, on first reading these lines of the 
great critic's journal, so moved that he clasped his hands to- 
gether, and for some time remained in the attitude of silent 
and admiring sympathy. And the sharer and guide of John- 
son's visit to the scenes hallowed by the prayers and toils of 
St. Columba, the Boswell to whom we owe one of the most be- 
witching volumes of biography, speaks of leaving quietly his 
Ilebridean host and his illustrious friend and stealing back for 
a solitary meditation amid the ruins of St. Columba's cathe- 



THE CRUSADES. 161 

dral ; and adds, with a simplicity that is touching, " I hoped 
that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should main- 
tain an exemplary conduct."* That the ruins of the island 
guarded effectually Boswell, in after times, from the pleasures 
of the table and the bottle, and made him discreet and blame- 
less, does not very distinctly appear. But if scenes made im- 
pressive with the sacrifices of scholars and saints, there toiling 
and dying, as early evangelists of Northern Europe, touch pro- 
foundly, how much more of divinest energy and what incom- 
parable power must linger around fields traversed by the feet 
of our Saviour himself; the hill -sides, lakes, mountains, and 
cities where taught the incarnate God, and where yet brood 
over the landscape memories of tiie Redeemer who bought us ; 
of the tomb whence emerged the Resurrection and the Life ; 
and the bill -tops whence ascended to his native skies the 
Brother who is to re-appear as Judge of the quick and the dead. 
Could mere local associations waken effectually, and renew us 
permanently, the scenes of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Olivet, and 
Cah^ary would breed intensest devotion. 

The Master himself seems to have guarded us against such 
expectations, as in themselves delusive. When, in passionate 
admiration, a hearer exclaimed over the privileges, as enviable 
and unrivalled, of an association near and prolonged with the 
great Teacher, such as had been the lot of his earthly mother 
— to that hearer's cry of blessedness for the parent that bare 
him, and the breasts that nursed him — he responded, "Yea, 
rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep 
it."f The spiritual tie of the truth by him propounded, and 

* Croker's Boswell, v. Y6 : London, 1839. f Luke, xi. 27, 28. 



162 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

by the believer received, is the bond of a truer efficiency 
and the pledge of a more lasting blessedness. It is the gen- 
eral sentiment of Christian theologians that the appearances, or 
theophanies, of the Old Testament, made in human form to 
the fathers, were by the Son, and not by the Father or the 
Paraclete. When Jacob, the great ancestor of the favored 
tribes, wrestled in the darkness with the Angel of the Covenant, 
and came out of the dread interview at Peniel halting for life, 
and, in memory of the mystic conflict, his posterity never after- 
ward partook, in the animals that were served on their tables, 
of the sinew that shrunk in their father's limb, it was God the 
Son who then, in closest strugglings, deigned to wrestle with 
the patriarch, till the Jacob emerged with the new title of 
Israel — the prince who had prevailed with God. If mere re- 
membrances of hallowed scenes were to become God's method 
of regenerating the souls of his worshippers, it would have 
seemed natural that our Lord, in his journeyings through Pal- 
estine, should have guided the twelve to the spot where this 
colloquy so many centuries before had occurred. IIow would 
it have told on the reverence of the apostles and their conver- 
sion to have heard from the Master that on that space he, 
centuries before the Advent at Bethlehem, had come near to 
their wayfaring parent. The Gospels give no hint of such loca- 
tion by our Lord in any of his journeys of the ancient visit, 
and such fixing the exact site of that memorable theophany. 
And, even after the wonders of the Resurrection, when Thomas 
— yet doubting while others believed and adored — fixed, as the 
crucial test of his faith, a probing with his own hands of the 
wound-prints received on the Cross, the Saviour, though indulg- 
ing the weakness of his apostle, censured it by commending 



THE CRUSADES. 163 

rather those who had not seen and yet believed.* The word 
of our Maker and Ransomer, duly endorsed, is a better and 
more blessed basis of onr trust than the mere visible and palpa- 
ble manifestation which may please eye and palm, but fail to 
reach the heart and sway and regenerate the soul. 

But myriads have dwelt upon this local association with the 
region occupied and traversed by our Lord, as giving to devo- 
tion its surest supports. To stand on Olivet, to pace the en- 
closure of Gethsemane, to cross the brook Cedron, to visit the 
grotto of the Nativity or the Holy Sepulchre, would seem to 
them methods unfailiug in their power to produce sympathy 
the most lively, and to leave behind impressions that should 
follow the pilgrim to his death-day, and be carried back to his 
native land, however remote, in images never to be effaced. 

The crusades mark a period of some two hundred years — 
stretching from the last decade of the eleventh century, or 
about 1090, to the last decade of the thirteenth century, or 
about 1290; spanning the lifetime of some six or seven suc- 
cessive generations in the population of Northern and Western 
Europe, when large portions of their population, severed from 
their native layers, precipitated themselves in successive ava- 
lanches, like the rocky and icy sides of some lofty Alpine 
mountains, rolling down with what seemed an irresistible force 
and impulse on tne East, and more especially on the land of 
Palestine — memorable to the Christian and the Hebrew world 
as the scene of the narratives and the home of the personages 
described in the Old and New Testaments. To the Christian, 
especially, as the place of the teachings, miracles, and Passion 

* John XX. 29. 



164 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of the Saviour, that land had its unparalleled attractions and 
sacredness. After the fall of the impenitent Jerusalem before 
the arms of the pagan Titus, its most venerable associations 
had been profaned and dishallowed by the pagan imperial 
power. But when Christianity had been established as the re- 
ligion of the empire, many of its sacred spots had received a 
new, perhaps a superstitious and imaginary consecration. When 
Mahometanism under the Saracens, its first champions, had con- 
quered the land, the pilgrimages of the Christians from oth- 
er lands had been tolerated. But when, in their stead, came 
the second and more barbarous proselytes of Mahometanism, 
the Turks, the treatment of the Christians seeking the scenes 
of the Nativity and Passion became cruel and ferocious. 

A false interpretation of the Apocalypse — a book intended 
to minister perpetual vigilance, but liable to recurrent misap- 
plication on the part of the presumptuous and headstrong — 
had become prevalent throughout Christendom in the begin- 
ning of the eleventh century, that, with the completion of the 
one thousand years on the Christian calendar, the end of the 
world was at hand. Men held with a loose hand their prop- 
erties, and looked wistfully to that far Eastern land of prophe- 
cy and revelation, where the second coming of the Lord was 
waited for as the signal of the last judgment. A general in- 
dignation w^as aroused that a region hallowed by his forerun- 
ners, the Hebrew prophets, and by himself and his apostles, 
should be given over to the savagery and brutal domination 
of the misbelieving Moslem. An earlier pontiff, Gregory VII. 
— the Hildebrand who, in his vigor and directness, had done 
so much to consolidate and elevate the pontifical power — 
had spoken of the desirableness of a Christian recovery of 



THE CRUSADES. 165 

the Holy Land. Dut it was under a later Pope, Urban IL, 
tliat the first movement occurred. So tumultuous and widely 
spread, so rapid and irregular, were these great popular move- 
ments, that the exact number of the Crusades is yet a matter 
of debate among high authorities. Some reckon six, others 
seven, and yet others eight ; and, extending the appellation to 
kindred agitations which took the name and rose from the 
upheaval, the number -would exceed even the highest of those 
already recounted. Peter the Uermit, a recluse of simplest hab- 
its and venerable aspect, proclaimed the insults of the misbe- 
lieving Moslems, and the sufferings of the Christian residents 
or visitors of the scenes of the Incarnation and Passion. A 
companion of his — equally destitute of worldly resources and 
backers, and known as Walter the Penniless, commended, as 
both of them were, by their poverty and self-denial, to the 
sympathy of the masses — led the earliest expedition. The 
cry of the multitudes that thronged to hear their passionate 
appeal was, " God wills it." Strong in the persuasion that a 
divine patronage was over them, and invincible, seemingly, in 
their rapid accessions, they assumed a cross on the dress as the 
emblem of their pledge to go in person for the recovery of the 
Holy Land from the infidels. Church councils, summoned to 
bear the appeal, sanctioned the enterprise ; no pontiffs with- 
held their solemn and eager benediction. It seemed for a time 
as if Christendom, loosed from its European basis, was hurling 
itself, in one huge embodiment of zeal and vengeance, upon 
the ancient and misbelieving East. But there was ignorance, 
inexperience, and brutality in the masses thus conducted. The 
task of supplying the commissariat, and ordering march and 
voyage and transportation, soon outgrew the expertness and 

8 



166 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

the powers of those who had roused the multitude, but could 
not discipline, order, harmonize, or safely direct it. When on 
the scene of their Eastern collision with the enemies to be re- 
pelled and dispossessed, Peter himself lost all true heart, and 
would have covertly withdrawn from a movement he could 
no longer control ; but he was pursued and forced to return. 
Myriads perished by hardship, hunger, and the incursions of 
the people whose lands and cities they were ravaging and in- 
festing. 

One of the crusades — from the large number of the youth, 
yet adolescent but not adult, gathered into its indiscriminate 
groupings, and torn from home, parents, and masters — was 
called the Crusade of the Children. Homeless, lawless, and 
reckless as the "hoodlums" of our own Pacific Coast, tbey 
perished in groups with fearful rapidity ; and of the remnant 
of them hundreds were betrayed into the hands of their ene- 
mies and sold as slaves. 

Godfrey of Bouillon (or Boulogne) and Tancred, so eminent 
in the poetic and romantic annals of the movement, were 
among the noble leaders. With vast expense of life, but with 
lavish displays of heroism, the crusaders persisted. Jerusalem 
was won, but with an indiscriminate slaughter of its Mahome- 
tan defenders, seventy thousand of the Moslems being put to 
the sword ; and these avengers of Christ wading in blood to 
the sacred places of the Lord's passion and entombment. 
Tasso, in his great Italian epic of " Jerusalem Delivered," has 
pictured their successes and their precedent sacrifices. There 
was much in the character of Godfrey, hailed as the first ruler of 
the new Christian kingdom, to deserve respect. But he soon 
died. Many of the crusaders, the sacred city won, turned their 



THE CRUSADES. 167 

faces again to their homes in Europe. New military orders, 
in part religious and in part secular, "svcre instituted to guard 
the lloly City and the Iloly Sepulchre. The one, the Knights 
Ilospitallers of St. John, afterward, from more recent removal 
and in later ages nearer our own, known as the Knights 
of Malta ; others, from their first station in the Temple, the 
Knights Templars, so famous in the after history of both 
France and England, and going down, after a desperate strug- 
gle, under the denunciation of pontiff and Christian mon- 
archs; and lastly, of German origin and nationality, the Teu- 
tonic Knights. 

But the Mahometans of Syria and Egypt recovered 
strength, and made the condition of the Christian powers un- 
easy and perilous. A second crusade was preached under the 
overwhelming influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in many re- 
gards the greatest man of his age, its oracle for wisdom, piety, 
and eloquence, and believed to be a worker of miracles. Em- 
perors and kings enlisted in the renewed movement. But 
passing along, as with a whirlwind of popular favor and super- 
stitious confidence, the terrible reverses came so soon and were 
so large, that the favor even of a St. Bernard was imperilled, 
and what he himself called "the season of his disgrace" set 
in. lie threw, and perhaps but too justly, the blame of the 
failure on the sins of the crusaders themselves. But there 
was, in the views of religion that even he received and incul- 
cated, much that made it unfitting that the Christ of the Gos- 
pels, and the Saviour as Paul preached him, should lend his 
sanction to errors so perverse and abuses so vast. The Greek 
emperor, nominally Christian, and almost as far gone from the 
purity of primitive Christianity as the Romish Church which 



1G8 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

furnished the crusades and canonized Bernard, dreaded and 
betrayed and counterworked the Latin invaders, whom he 
feigned to treat as allies, but dreaded as subverters of his own 
power. 

In the third crusade was enlisted against the heroic Saladin, 
who mustered Saracen and Turk, among others the heroic 
Richard the Lion-hearted, the English king, of name so terri- 
ble to the Mahometan foes that, sixty years afterward, a 
Christian visiting the Holy Land found Richard's name used 
by the Mahometan women to silence their children. If a 
Mahometan rider found his horse shy, he was wont to ex- 
claim, *' Dost think Richard behind the bush ?" But Sala- 
din had captured Jerusalem, and with no such indiscriminate 
slaughter of its Christian occupants as Godfrey had inflicted 
on its Mahometan residents when taking it from them. 
Richard saw the city from a hill, veiled his face, and cried in- 
dignantly at the failing strength of his forces, " Those unwill- 
ing to rescue are unworthy to see the Sepulchre of Christ." 
He retired as from an unequal conflict in a truce for three 
years, three months, three weeks, and three days. The Chris- 
tian pilgrims were to have leave to visit the Sepulchre; and the 
English hero returned, to find on his homeward way captivity 
at the hands of a treacherous German confederate in the orig- 
inal campaign. Though released from this prison, and reach- 
ing England, Richard died at the siege of a petty provincial 
castle. Saladin died at Damascus, honored for valor and virtue 
even of his Christian foemen, and bidding in death his wind- 
ing sheet at the end of a spear to be borne through the streets 
of the city with the herald's cry, " This is all that remains to 
the mighty Saladin, the conqueror of the East." 



TUE CRUSADES. 1G9 

In point of policy and influcnco no wearer of the tiara has 
surpassed the great pontiff, Innocent III. He proclaimed a 
fourtli crusade, but it turned aside to capture Constantinople. 
A fifth assailed Egypt. The last great crusades, on Syrian 
and African soil — by some called the sixth and seventh, and 
by others counted the seventh and eighth — were led, at inter- 
vals of twenty years, by one of the greatest and best of the 
kings of France, Louis IX., called Saint Louis, and in his per- 
sonal character (as portrayed in the pages of his faithful Join- 
ville), in his independent bearing toward the Roman see, and 
in his management of his own France, proving himself not 
unworthy of the title. But his first crusade left him a pris- 
oner in Egypt, honored and revered even by his captors. The 
walls of Cairo were girt with the heads of Christian victims. 
Released on a large ransom, and by surrendering Damietta, he 
returned to France. After a wise and honored reign at home, 
he resumed his endeavor in a final crusade; and Edward of 
England — then a prince, the son of the reigning King, Hen- 
ry HI. — with many English knights, accompanied him. The 
Christian fleet sailed fur Tunis. The plague broke out in the 
besiegers' camp. Louis, seized by it, ordered himself to be laid 
on a bed of ashes, and died with the words of the Psalmist on 
his lips : *' I will enter into thy house, O Lord ; I will worship 
toward thy holy temple." AVc doubt not he entered then and 
thus the realm of higher light, where so much needs to be un- 
learned even by the best of these earthly militants. His son, 
successor to the French crown, abandoned the ill-fated enter- 
prise, and returned to his dominions in Europe. 

The Mameluke power had grown up in Egypt. They had 
taken Antioch, slaying seventeen thousand of its inhabitants, 



IVO ERAS AND CHAliACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and selling one hundred thousand as slaves. In 1291 Acre, 
last of the Christian strongholds, passBd also into their hands. 
It was described, even by Christians, as the most dissolute of 
cities; and of its sixty thousand captives death or bondage 
was the natural, perchance the legitimate, lot. This was in 
1291, rounding the thirteenth century. 

To those who study the tracks of Providence across the 
plains of secular history by the lights of the old Bible this 
failure may seem not inexplicable. The crusaders were them- 
selves largely pervaded by superstition and grossest corruption. 
St. Louis had complained in confidence to his own good Join- 
ville of the evils that he was compelled to see in his own 
train, and as in the shadow of his own tents. The Templar 
Order, great as were the exploits and valor of some of its 
members, labored long and widely under the imputation of 
infidelity and grievous profligacy. The Knights of Malta, in 
later times — the old order of Hospitallers of St. John — great 
as were their heroic achievements against Mahometan sieges, 
were, as Coleridge saw their later members in his Mediterra- 
nean experiences, not patterns of virtue in their bearing and 
social influence, but the very opposite. He who sees how, in 
the Old Testament, God raised up Jeroboam, with a divine 
commission to punish the idolatries and apostasies of the line 
of David, kings as they were from a holy ancestor, and then 
afterward gave Jehu, through Elijah, the terrible charge against 
the house of Ahab, recollects how the Jeroboam and the Jehu 
were guilty of worshipping molten calves, and in the forbidden 
high places. Such a student of the dealings of God with man 
can well believe that Mahometanism was, both Saracen and 
Turkish, an implement, in the hands of the righteous and sov- 



THE CRUSADES. l7l 

ereign God, to punisb the perverseness and apostasy of those 
who, as the nominal Christendom, abusing great privileges and 
neglecting true oracles, were the raore flagrantly and inexcusa- 
bly guilty before his high and equitable chancery. 

And the Protestant Christian, blessing God for an open Bi- 
ble and a free Press, can rejoice that in its light he reads the 
substitution of saints for the Saviour, and of outer forms for 
an inner and spiritual renovation, as being to many but a wor- 
ship of devils, that the Most High and the Most Holy will 
most sorely and most surely avenge. The Mahometan proph- 
et, wicked and malign as were his forgeries, as a witness for 
the Divine Unity against the idolatries of Mariolatry and the 
invocation of graven images and crucifixes, might, like Jehu, 
be worthy of little honest applause when, like Jehu, he called 
the nations to see " his zeal for the Lord." But Mahometan- 
ism was a rod which the true and one Jehovah might most 
righteously employ against the pervcrtcrs of his Scriptures, 
and the Rehoboams and the Jehorams of the house of Aliab, 
who might wear mitres and tiaras, but who certainly could lit- 
tle claitn, in their edicts, in their councils, in their traditions, 
in their indulgences, in their crusades, to bear on the front of 
their banners " Holiness to the Lord," the old motto of ancient 
Israel in the days of her devout fealty. 

For besides their crusades on Eastern territory and against 
the minaret and the Koran, the papal power proclaimed its 
crusades against the Albigenscs in Southern France, and its 
crusades, on a smaller scale but of the like ferocity, against 
the Stedingers of Holstein and Northern Flanders. And with 
the crusades the pontifical power built itself up into greater 
despotism as against the temporal rulers of Christian Europe. 



172 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

It sent its legates with some of these expeditions, and the 
legatine power became afterward a formidable implement for 
consolidating and broadening papal aggressions. 

That Pontifical power sought eagerly the overthrow of the 
Christian Greek Empire of Constantinople, for it was, though 
a Christian patriarchate, a rival of the power set up at Rome, 
and that Italian sovereign assuming more and more to be the 
Catholic and exclusive head of the Church. Nobles and even 
kings were ready to mortgage and relinquish their possessions 
and revenues in equipping the crusades. The dead hand of 
the Church, to use the expressive phrase of the old law% was 
a corpse hand, whose gripe once fixed was not to be relaxed, 
set and stiffened in death. There would have been much, in 
a patriarchate at Jerusalem, where James had taught and suf- 
fered in the days of the first apostles, that to the common mind 
would (had the crusades attached it to the ruler on the Tiber) 
have given Rome a more gorgeous aspect of pristine sacred- 
ness than could belong to an episcopate and a patriarchate 
built on the site only of Paul's tomb and of Peter's. 

The story of Syria is a peculiar one. From Hermon and 
Lebanon on the north, to the Dead Sea on the south, from 
Damascus to the river of Egypt, how long ago was it sealed 
to Abraham ; yet through how many centuries were the 
promised seed to await full occupancy of the Promised Land. 
Egypt and the Exodus through weary years tried their faith. 
The sins of the Cauaanities had not filled the measure ; and 
God, the ever just, waited till the brim w^as reached. When 
the Chaldeans, and the Antiochus, and the Romans came, each 
had a lease, as the avengers ; but the fee awaited a final resto- 
ration to the exiled owners. They returned. The consummate 



TEE CRUSADES. 173 

sin of the rejection and butchery of their fathers' Messiah 
called down a new, a direr, a broader expatriation. But through 
liow many centuries have successive rulers and races had their 
lease of avenging occupancy — the Jew a wanderer and an un- 
believer and an exile still. 

The French Jansenists, and the English and American 
Protestants, have believed that, as God's Word announced an 
actual expatriation which has been verified, so with equal dis- 
tinctness it predicts a literal restoration. Isaiah and Ezekiel 
go ofiE the stage, as it were, announcing such return of the long- 
banished people. If, as many exegetes suppose, the Jewish 
people return in their impenitence to the land long leased and 
mortgaged to their various foemen races, but one day to come 
again into their occupancy and tillage, it will be the scene of 
a new invasion from the formidable Gog and Magog of proph- 
ecy, as both the older and the newer portions of the divine 
oracles portray them. "God is in one mind, and none can 
turn him." Moses, in Midian, could afford to wait the long- 
protracted delays in the fulfilment of the pledge that to 
Abraham should the chosen land go. It went. In his own 
"wise and absolute care of the thrones and races of our planet, 
God may have summoned the Moslem to do his own wort, as 
blindly as of old Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus and Ahasuerus 
and Pompey and Titus did that same work in that same land. 
And Israel, awakened from long obduracy, shall yet again know 
the Messiah whom their race for so many generations have 
pierced by fresh provocations; but whom they cannot worry 
out of the fulness of his omniscient prescience, and out of 
the truthfulness of his immutable oracles. The blood of 
Calvary is not soaked out of the sight of Ilim who has 



174 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

pledged to his Son that the Christ shall " see the travail of 
his soul." 

The Roman Church and the Greek Church are responsible 
to the unbelieving Jew and the misbelieving Moslem for the 
continuous scandal of the Sacred Fire, as it is called — that ex- 
hibition of fanatical frenzy and of sheer fraud, renewed within 
the walls of what is called the Holy Sepulchre year by year. 
The brass that Moses by divine order framed into a serpent 
figure, and elevated it to give healing to the camp bitten by 
the fiery serpents, the good Hezekiah ordered to be destroyed, 
as a new Nehushtan, when it became the object of idolatrous 
reverence. The Nehushtan of this annual scandal has no 
claim to any divine origin. It is the sheerest pretext and the 
baldest imposture. And the Turkish soldier, employed to 
keep the belligerent Greeks and Latins from mutual slaughter 
over the enkindling and distributing of the flame, may, in the 
Judgment-day, lay the guilt of his continued impenitence, as 
before the Bible, and his continued adhesion to the Koran, in 
some dread measure at least, upon the bodies nominally Chris- 
tian, but really and so far forth antichristian, who tolerated and 
repeated so utter a mockery and impiety over the tomb, as 
they call it, of the Christ who is the very " Truth." 

It is an evidence of the longing that a devout Romanist, 
spite of the failure of the crusades, yet feels toward the land 
of Christ's earthly manifestations, that, two centuries after the 
failure of the great crusades, so called, Columbus, the great 
Genoese, who to Castile and Leon gave a new world, has in 
his last will, as it is called, the expression of a desire to recover 
the Holy Land. And so, when the early Jesuit founders were 
in the incipient stages of their great enterprise, they spent, in 



THE CRUSADES. 175 

the middle of the centur}^ after the death of Columbus, one 
year on the shores of the Mediterranean, contemplating a pur- 
pose "which they had then formed to devote themselves to 
work in the Holy Land and to the conversion of the Mahom- 
etans. Earlier than that, in the close of the crusades, were 
formed the great mendicant bodies, the Franciscans and the 
Dominicans. The latter were the order of Preachers, and soon 
had the Inquisition as their charge, and the emblem of their 
founder, Dominic — a dog with a flaming torch — as the picture of 
their activities. Loyola, in a later time, had from his military 
training given to his order a spirit of blind, military obedience 
that gave them immense power. And when the conscience 
with a thorough surrender was given to the conscience and 
will of their General, by each individual member of the order, 
it created a new clement of unity and compactness and invin- 
cibility in the new confraternity. But the Holy Land, over 
which crusaders for two hundred years vainly expended such 
blood and treasures, to which a dying Columbus turned wist- 
fully his eyes, and for which a living Loyola, in the commence- 
ment of his enterprise, sighed as a field he would fain enter, 
is, if we read aright the intimations of the Book, reserved for 
a Jewish occupancy, to become ultimately the scene of Jewish 
conversion and regeneration. It is the calculation of some 
scholars that the lives sacrificed in the old crusades were five 
millions. Late German scholars raise the estimate to nine 
millions. But the Book in whose pages lies the history of 
that land's old occupancy and forfeiture, and in whose pages, 
not yet fully deciphered, lies too the pledge of its ultimate re- 
covery and evangelization, is a book that appeals, not to a sur- 
rendered conscience, given blindly into a fellow-mortal's keep- 



176 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

ing, but to the individual conscience, in its own free prayers, 
and with its own free powers, imploring and receiving and 
obeying the free impulses of the Holy Spirit. The missions 
and the churches that use this volume conscientiously and 
freely, under the guidance of this unerring and exhaustless 
Spirit, will sec, in God's good time, Emmanuel's land again 
loyally and universally his. 

It is encouraging, again, as a sign of our times, that Judaism 
in the person of the late lamented Neander gave to the Chris- 
tian Church and its history a convert of transparent piety, and 
whose vast erudition alike Protestant and Romanist learned to 
trust and to revere ; that in Montefiore, a brother-in-law of the 
elder Rothschild, an English visitor, still an adherent to the 
faith of the synagogue, Palestine has received but lately hos- 
pitals of large cost and liberal endowment ; that to a statesman 
of Hebrew blood, though Christian in his present attachments, 
the British Empire — never in its colonies more widely extended 
than at this very day — has committed for a time the helm of 
national affairs ; that to a convert from Judaism, Alexander, 
the British Christians and the German intrusted the Bishopric 
of Jerusalem, a see recognized and endowed by the joint action 
of these two Protestant peoples ; that it was to the establish- 
ment of such see, under conjoint influence of German Lu- 
therans and British Episcopalians, that the more advanced lead- 
ers of the Oxford Tract movement took exception, and this was 
to several of them the direct occasion of their renouncing Prot- 
estantism and going over to frank Catholicism ; that railroads 
and canals, in the interests of modern commerce, are seeking to 
turn the waters and territories of Egypt, Palestine, and old 
Chaldea into the new pathways of the nineteenth century, for 



THE CRUSADES. Ill 

a uiore general intercourse among the nations. In the con- 
verfi-ino" liirht of these facts is it not evident that the land called 
Holy has yet in reserve prospects and destinies which merely 
unaided human sagacity is little able to forecast? 

Let us remember, again, how even the bigotry and ferocity 
of the old crusaders accomplished much, in the wise overrul- 
ings of God's providence, which pontiles and councils and pil- 
grims and Knights Hospitaller and Templar never imagined. 
Much as the West lavished for what seemed vanity, it received 
in reflex influence from the ancient East more really than it- 
self either designed or expected. The despotic power of the 
old feudalism was, in large portions of Europe, lessened or thor- 
oughly undermined. The larger nobles lost, but the common- 
alty gained. The great trading cities of the Mediterranean 
and the Baltic became wealthier, and more populous, and more 
free. The peasantry, once largely serfs, became fugitives to 
and freemen of the oTowino: towns. The liberties of Britain 
had, Montesquieu said, their first origin in the solitude of the 
old German forests. But an intermediate step in the develop- 
ment of freedom, not only for Britain, but for the Netherlands 
and for Italy and for France and for Spain, was in the growth 
of power in the larger towns, centres of manufacture and trade. 
And the baron, gone, by large and lavish mortgagings and sac- 
rifices, with his kindred and retainers, to the Sacred War, oft 
never lived to return ; or, returning, he found freedmen where 
he had left on his departure but retainers in villenage. 

So, too, from Arab masters and versions, many of the schol- 
ars and colleges of the West learned to know the treasures of 
old Greece. Aristotle came into honor, and was the revered 
master of many who, from Saracen instructors, had learned to 



178 EUAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

heed liim, as philosopher and naturalist and logician and meta- 
physician. So, too, the arts and conveniences and luxuries of 
the East were remembered by the returning palmers and war- 
riors. The shallots of Western gardens fetched their name 
from the Ascalon of Syrian coasts, where the crusaders learned 
to relish and whence they transplanted them, with the plum, 
and the sugar-cane, and the maize, or Turkish corn, as they 
called it, brought from their far wanderings. Gothic architect- 
ure, too, though many seem loath to admit it, with its inter- 
lacing arches and its grouped columns, so generally and widely 
and simultaneously introduced into the sacred structures of 
the West, had its origin in Eastern types, and, perhaps, in the 
shadow of palm-groves or of the widely-arching banyan-tree of 
India. The men who were forced to forego feudalism took up 
chivalry, and its coats of arms, and its science of heraldry, and 
its tournaments. Medicine, and geography, and navigation, all 
were greatly affected by the new light won in Eastern travel. 
War adopted new engines and methods after the formidable 
Greek fire had made its terrible energy known ; and this led 
probably to the invention in Europe, or to the transfer from 
far China, of the gunpowder and cannon that so recast the ter- 
rible artillery of mutual devastation and slaughter. New fig- 
ures, the Arabic, took in accounts the place of the old and 
cumbrous Latin letters of the Roman alphabet. 

They saw, too, new diseases. The terrible leprosy travelled 
on the skirts of their decimated and often defeated armies. 
The lazar-houses, once so numerously dotting Continental Eu- 
rope, gave a terrible significancy to the imagery of Scripture ; 
and the force and worth of the Saviour's miracles, as the 
evangelists describod them, took on new credit, when men saw 



THE CRUSADES. 179 

in their own homes and kindred the hideous corrosions of the 
malady that their skill could so little relieve. Their very lan- 
guage had its new phrases, and words that we use with little 
glimpse, it may be, of their first meaning, came into the "West- 
ern vocabulary, as the memorial of recent observations and of 
the travellers' wide experiences. The false prophet Mahomet 
was often in England called Maumet ; figured with Satan in 
the mysteries or rude dramas of the age ; and from his name 
thus used some derive the word " mummeyy," now applied to 
idle and worthless shows. One of the strongest terms of dispar- 
agement for the utterly reckless and worthless is " miscreant." 
In the old French, and so passing over to the English, their 
Norman kin, it meant merely at first "a misbeliever," and 
eminently a believer in the false prophet of Mecca. And as 
men who had returned listless and penniless from their far 
Eastern pilgrimage and warfare talked often of the "Holy 
Land," the Sainte Terre^ from which they had come, it went 
over into popular use as " saunterer," a man without a busi- 
ness, and often without a home. The Iloly Land, idly sought 
and cravenly left, had made him a vague rambler, loath to put 
hand to the plougli or the flail, and ready to withdraw his 
shoulder from each honest but heavy burden. 

The ages of chivalry have been painted in colors too vivid 
by many of more recent times. As presented in their own 
chronicles they retained much of bigotry, of profligacy, of 
ignorance, and of oppression. " Ages of faith " they were, as 
too flattering and partial scholars would paint them. But 
Baronius, a more erudite student, and one all whose preju- 
dices would lead him to shield the Church from needless dis- 
paragement, has described these times and the pontiffs often 



180 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. 

who then held the see of St. Peter, as it was called, in the 
most odious and repulsive light. The celibacy of the monas- 
tic and military orders, and the breaking up of homes and 
households in the West, when husband and father precipitated 
themselves on the ancient East and its allurements and its 
vices, was a process that augured as ill for the camp thus peo- 
pled, and the alien cities thus stormed, as for the hearth-stones 
and old sanctuaries that it had deserted to the care of stew- 
ards, flatterers, and varlets. 

A scepticism was often, and on authority that cannot al- 
ways be disputed, attributed to some of the returning cru- 
saders, who, ignorant of the Bible, and seeing often in the 
misbelieving Moslem a truthfulness and integrity, or even gen- 
erosity, that could not be despised, had become careless of all 
religion. They were represented as indulging in an occasional 
temerity of profane utterance and impious opinions that must, 
in men of their energy and position, have borne its baleful 
fruits on society around, in the families they bred, and in the 
retainers whom they led. 

There was, in God's overruling goodness, a residue of simple, 
often mute, trust in his grace and faithfulness, that, in less con- 
spicuous portions of the community, averted the full measure 
of divine wrath from a society nominally Christian but largely 
paganized. 

The Cross of Christ, as Paul preached it, and as the apostle 
exemplified it, was a spiritual power, working within the heart, 
ruling the life, and so blazing out upon the world ; " crucify- 
ing its confessor to the world, and the world unto him." The 
cross on the shoulder, and on the banner, and on the fane all 
varnished with superstitions, and over the camp all teeming 



THE CRUSADES. 181 

with carnage and outrage, was not the talisman to which God 
had annexed tlie power of his own resistless and invincible 
Spirit. The descending energies of Pentecost flamed upon a 
Church thus cross-bearing ; and to the people of God, however 
few, poor, obscure, and ignorant, that truly rely on the Emman- 
uel and vividly and simply invoke and abide the descending 
Paraclete, are reserved the ultimate conquest of all nations, and 
the final overthrow of all adverse powers, however old, proud, 
and defiant. " The travail of Christ's soul," the crucified, has 
the universe for its assured and seasonable recompense. Such 
an agony only could earn such a diadem ; and what it has 
earned it can in no event foresro. 



182 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 



IX. 

LUTHER AXD HIS TIMES, 

One of the' keenest witticisms which even Swift, that master 
of grave sarcasm, uttered was when he transh^ted the motto of 
his Queen. Its Latin, " Semper eadem," meant Hterally " Ever 
the same," and so claimed for the sovereign and her character 
changeless conslstencv. The humorist o-ave as its Eno-lish 
equivalent, " Worse and worse." And here the duplication of 
the one unchanged word meant, instead of unity of purpose, 
and an inflexible sameness and sino-leness of aim, an ever-o-row- 
ing deterioration, a worsening, that grew darker with every day 
that went over the regal wearer of the title. It was a gibe 
rather than a judgment. Anne had not deserved it. But it 
may afford an illustration how lack of change may slope easily 
toward declension and ruin. All human institutions and socie- 
ties need perpetual vigilance and anxious revision and minute 
supervision, to hold them in a course of real growth and health- 
fulness. It was the Divine witness of old against Moab that 
the nation had settled upon its lees. Best may become rotten.- 
ness. Time itself, as Bacon has said, is one of the greatest of 
innovators, and the changes thus invisibly and incessantly com- 
ing upon man, and upon his works and upon his customs, are 
often parasitical growths that must be retrenched as mouldi- 
ness and funo-ous excrescence, if the orio-inal excellence is to 
be sustained or the true life maintained. The promise of the 



LUTHER AND JUS TIMES. 183 

Divine Husbandman, in the new dispensation, as to the con- 
tinued energy and fertility of the vine of his own pU^nting, 
was that he would purge and prune it, that it might bring 
forth more fruit. Else its sap would run but into leaf and 
wood, and its free riot of foliage and branch would be barren- 
ness. It needed to be "cut down" closelv, that its clusters 
might be redundant and its purple grapes gladden the vine- 
dresser. So the human face that, in its anxiety to preserve its 
pristine traits and symmetry, forswears all recourse to the foun- 
tain, the ewer, or the napkin, is likely, from the inevitable ac- 
cretions and the hourly deposits of grime, to incur not only in- 
crustations of dirt, but the first instalments of disease in its 
strange aspirations after a mistaken unchangeableness. In the 
old economy we know who blamed Eli because, when his sons 
made themselves vile, and he, though not sharing their corrup- 
tions, had yet " restrained them not ;" and how the same Di- 
vine Arbiter honored Josiah because he had dared, spite of the 
slow accretion of abuse and crime which came as his heritage 
from the past, to reform it back again to its original and God- 
given models, lopping down with a keen pruning-knife what 
had grown rank and large under the name of prescription and 
hoar antiquity. 

An era in the religious history of Europe known as the Ref- 
ormation has, however, by some admirers of the past, even in 
Protestant England and among the clergy of her Established 
Church, been petulantly called within a few years " the Defor- 
mation." Such cavillers must have read carelessly the history 
of the corruptions of the Middle Ages, and must have blinked 
very unaccountably some confessions, by very learned and un- 
impeachable authorities of the Roman communion, as to the 



184 EM AS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

enormities and atrocities that were found even in the court of 
the Pontificate and among wearers of the papal tiara. The 
preachers, the founders of the religious orders, the councils held 
in those dark ages, all bewail and denounce the aboundings of 
superstition and oppression that cried aloud for a change. 
Enemies and friends have agreed in acknowledging the great 
power and boldness of Martin Luther, in bringing about signal 
and wide-spread change in the age where God's providence as- 
signed his lot. He was no discoverer, no leader of a military 
host, no inheritor of treasures, no statesman haunting princely 
courts, no child of the purple and the palace fated to wear rank 
and wield influence from his birth. But poor, and the son of 
a miner, he stood up in an era when the discovery of America 
had added to the world's wealth ; when the printing-press gave 
knowledge wider currency and thought a vast range of domi- 
nation ; when the revival of letters brought the stores of old 
Greek and Roman literature before the schools of all Christen- 
dom ; when the papacy was at the culmination of its grandeur 
and sway ; when Spain, in the control of the Emperor Charles 
v., was, in arms and political power and affluence of resources, 
the leading nation of the world, by its soldiers, and its colonies 
East and West, its mines, its hold on the Peninsula, on Ger- 
many, on the Netherlands, and during one period, by the mar- 
riage of Philip II., the son of Charles, to Mary of England, and 
in after times by his, Philip's, kinsmanship to Mary Queen of 
Scots, affecting powerfully the policy of both England and 
Scotland, then distinct kingdoms. And this son of a miner, 
with but a stout heart and a clear brain, and an open Bible, 
and a trust in God and his Word, foiled the craft and the might 
of the empire, and smote the Pontifical see blows from the ef- 



LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 185 

feet of which it has never recovered. As said French Catholic 
scholars some thirty years ago, the Abbe Glaire and the Vi- 
comte Walsh, in the " Encyclopedic Catholique," a work of 
eighteen folio volumes, issued under ecclesiastical sanction : 
" There is not, perhaps, in history a guiltier name than that 
of Martin Luther, the patriarch of Protestantism. For fifteen 
centuries the Church of Christ has seen many heretics assail 
her, many rebellious children turn against her; but never a 
sect, never a heresy, never a persecution, presented traits so 
grave, and principles so dangerous, as the revolt of the six- 
teenth century raised and disguised under the delusive banner 
of Reform."* 

Who, the Protestant reader, after reading such a denuncia- 
tion may well inquire, was the stalwart foe that swung so heavy 
a mace, and dealt such shattering desolation ? 

In 1483 Martin Luther was born in Eislcben, a town in 
Thuringia; his father a poor miner, whose forges in Mansfield 
brought him scanty profits. In that year Michael Angelo, the 
great sculptor, architect, and painter, was yet but a lad of nine, 
and Copernicus, the astronomer, a boy of ten. Four years be- 
fore, in 1479, Ferdinand and Isabella had united the two king- 
doms of Castile and Aragon, and set up, with paternal care, the 
Inquisition in their dominions. Nine years after the German 
boy's birth, Columbus, with the funds and patronage of the 
same Ferdinand and Isabella, had discovered the islands of His- 
paniola and Cuba. And when Martin was eleven years of age, 
or two years after, the continent of America Avas discovered, to 
become afterward the scene of our ancestral Colonies and our 

* " Encycl. Cath.," xiv. p. 66 : Paris, 1847. 



186 Eli AS AND CHAEACTERS OF IlISTORY. 

Revolution. As a poor singer -boy, when at the colleges of 
Magdeburg and Eisenach, he asked alms and sung hymns at the 
door of the charitable. A pious matron, wife of Cotta, Burgo- 
master of Eisenach, noticed the poor singer-boy and took him 
into her house; and his studies were thus easier. At eigh- 
teen lie left for the University of Erfurt. He had been two 
years a student at Eisenach before seeing an entire Bible, and 
he determined to study Hebrew and Greek, its original lan- 
guages. His first university studies had been of philosophy 
and law, for the latter of which professions, as the more gain- 
ful, his father had intended him. Losing a friend by assassina- 
tion, and a thunder-bolt falling to the earth at his side, he gave 
up the secular studies of his original choice and retired, against 
his father's wish and protest, to a convent of Augustinian 
monks in Erfurt, the same city where was the university. The 
attempt to commend himself to God by austerities but sad- 
dened him. Staupitz, vicar-general of the order which he had 
joined, said to him that true repentance began in the love of 
God, and bade him love the Saviour who had first loved him. 
The books of the great father Augustine, from whom the order 
had its name, interested, but the books of Tauler, a pious mys- 
tic of the Dominicans of the fourteenth century, and an anony- 
mous work, " Theologia Germanica," of the same century, es- 
pecially touched and profited him. He was ordained priest, 
and appointed Professor of Philosophy in the University of 
Wittenberg, giving lectures on the Bible which drew students 
rapidly from the other parts of Germany. His own Au- 
gustinian order sent him in 1511, when he was twenty-eight 
years of age, to represent their cause in some question as to the 
government of the order. "The just shall live by faith" was 



LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 187 

the Scripture saying with which he began at Wittenberg his 
exposition of the Bible. At Rome, where the violent and mar- 
tial Julius II. was pontiff, and impiety was blatant and rampant 
in ecclesiastical circles, he was startled. When climbing, on 
his knees, the reputed staircase of Pilate shown in the Eternal 
City, that saying, " The just shall live by faith," sounded as in 
his ears. " For 100,000 florins I would not have missed see- 
ins: Rome," he often afterward said. lie came back r de- 
vouter man, and resumed his biblical teaching, but to attack 
the scholastic philosophy of Aristotle, then dominant. Christ's 
death was the theme of his lectures in the professor's chair 
and of his sermons; and in 151G he accepted the place of 
vicar-general of his order. The next year, 1517, Leo X., a new 
pope, strong in the culture and artistic elegance and wealth of 
his Medicean family, sent through the Catholic world indul- 
gences to be sold. Tetzcl, of the Dominican order, was, for 
Saxony, Luther's country, one of tlie most glib and bold and 
successful of the venders of these indulgences. 

Now, Hume and other sceptics have tried to trace all of 
Luther's zeal to the fact that the order, the Augustinian, of 
"which he was one, had not been chosen, but the Dominican, to 
peddle in Saxony these popular latch-keys of Paradise. But, in 
respect to this, it is sufficient to say that the great principle of 
the Reformation, "justification by faith," had dawned on his 
mind, by the instrumentality of Staupitz, more than ten years 
before, and had been driven home upon him, on his road to the 
Italian capital, six years before. Now, to this day the greatest 
teachers of the Roman communion hold indulgences to be of 
discharge only from the penal consequences of sin in this 
world. But their exact efficiency is yet matter of debate. 



188 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

They are proffered for certain visits and religious services in 
some of the churches of Rome to this day. They were, in a 
late day, vended in large quantities in Mexico and South Amer- 
ica. In Luther's time the promises made by Tetzel as to their 
cogency and their currency took in heaven no less than earth. 
He, Tetzel, said he had saved more souls by his indulgences 
than the apostles by their sermons. The great purpose to 
which Leo X. would apply the proceeds was the completion 
and adornment of the magnificent cathedral of St. Peter's, yet 
at Rome the admiration and pride of the Catholic world. But 
if souls, deluded by the promise of immunity from condemna- 
tion, were the chief patrons of this traffic, the stones and tim- 
bers of that edifice have a history behind them not in keeping 
with the words to St. Peter, alleged by the Catholic Church as 
the charter of his superior power in the apostolic college and 
in the whole Catholic OEcumenical Church : " On this rock I 
will build my Church." As Tetzel stated it, the barter of 
faith, receiving lucre for license, and so warranting celestial 
grace, it is not too much to say that the blood of souls de- 
ceived to their endless perdition was the cement of that stately 
structure. And what the prophet of old said to Israel, in 
days of Hebrew fraud and violence, comes back to a devout 
and meditative Protestant, as he gazes on that splendor : " The 
beam out of the timber shall cry and the stone out of the wall 
shall answer it." Not Peter, nor Paul, nor David, nor Abra- 
ham, nor the Master himself, would sanction the creed of sal- 
vability as mercenary and matter of traffic, as Tetzel coarsely 
propounded it. 

Luther was justly indignant. It was no emulation, in hope 
of scanty gains, to his mind so crude and blasphemous, but be- 



LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 189 

cause absolute purchase with gold was simony. If John the 
Baptist preached repentance as the harbinger of Christ's king- 
dom, Luther preached that of repentance and regeneration as 
based on Christ's free love and redemption, on his cross, as still, 
after sixteen centuries, the law of the eternal kingdom. He 
attached ninety-five theses, or propositions, against indulgences 
to the door of the Wittenberg church. It was on the last day 
of October, 1517, that he nailed them there, amid pilgrims 
who in crowds had come to buy indulgences, and returned to 
their hamlets and fields with copies of Luther's protest instead. 
Tetzel was, of course, enraged. Luther's timid friends quailed, 
but Luther as yet honestly held that Leo X. would disavow 
such principles as Tetzel proclaimed when vending like a 
charlatan his sacred wares. Leo X. thought it a mere monks* 
quarrel. Fugger, a rich German banker, of the house who so 
magnificently entertained an emperor by a fire of cinnamon, 
into which were fed notes and bonds recording the emperor's 
indebtedness to the house, was the capitalist behind Tetzel in 
the sale of the bulls of indulgence, and was, of course, not in- 
different to the discredit of the wares and the opposition en- 
countered by the main pulpit vender of the merchandise. 
Luther moved widely, preaching everywhere his denunciations 
of doctrines so reckless. He printed his theses, and also com- 
mentaries on the Lord's Prayer and on the Decalogue. His 
works found their way even into Italy. Luther was told to 
appear before Leo X. at Rome. He would not go. The dun- 
geon and the scaffold would have awaited him there. A leg- 
ate was sent into Germany, the Cardinal Cajetan, who called 
Luther to an appearance at Augsburg. He appeared, and re- 
fused retractation. The Elector of Saxony, his sovereign, a wise 

9 



190 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

but cautious prince, would not deliver Luther to the legate. 
Luther appealed from the Pope to a general council. Luther 
continued his lectures, which drew crowds from far ; and pub- 
lished expositions of Scripture, especially that on the Galatians, 
which he used to call his own epistle, an exposition which 
Bunyan, years after, so profited by. The imperial seat being 
vacant, Frederick, the Saxon Elector, was offered support to 
become the occupant of the throne. He declined it, and gave 
his influence to the election of Charles V. Luther's life was 
openly and in secret threatened. Some brave knights, friendly 
to the Reformation, offered their aid in arms to protect him ; 
but the reply of the dauntless man, a martyr in heart, was, 
" By the Word the world has been conquered ; by the Word 
the Church has been saved ; by the Word, too, she will be re- 
stored. I do not despise your offers, but I will not lean upon 
any one but Christ." The restoration of which the great con- 
fessor had not yet despaired was his aim ; not the overthrow 
of the Christian commonwealth, but its establishment on the 
one immovable foundation, Christ — on his righteousness, on 
his sacrifice, and on his oracles. In 1520 he launched an ap- 
peal to the German nobles on the Reformation of Christen- 
dom. Two thousand students had clustered about him at 
AVittenberg. In that same year, 1520, when he addressed the 
nobles on Reformation, he assailed in another treatise the Mass ; 
and then his work on the Babylonian captivity of the Church 
appeared, comparing the lot of God's people to the exiled Israel 
when the Chaldeans led them from native land to the banks of 
the Euphrates. In a letter to the Pope, Leo X., he compares 
him, the Pope, to Daniel thrown among wolves, as Luther held 
the pontiff to be at his capital. 



LUTEER AND HIS TIMES. 191 

The pontiff launched a bull of excommunication. It had cer- 
tainly more the howl of a Avolf than the tones of a Daniel in 
its repudiation of the heretic of Wittenberg. On receiving 
it Luther drew up a solemn protest, carrying his appeal to a 
general council, and in December, 1520, invited the University 
to see the pontiff's bull burnt before the church door. Eras- 
mus as yet had said that the best men inclined to Luther, who 
had been condemned only by two universities, and by them, 
though condemned, not confuted. The Emperor, lately crown- 
ed, was understood to favor tine pontiff; but, from regard to 
his patron, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, would have Luther con- 
demned only by a regular diet at Worms, where two questions 
were to be presented — reformation in the political condition 
of the empire, and in religion. lie, Luther, was summoned to 
appear before the Emperor and retract, and edicts against his 
books were everywhere placarded. On his way to Worms, the 
Elector's chancellor, a high officer of this his own sovereign, 
entreated Luther not to enter a town where his death was 
already decided upon. " Tell your master," was his reply, 
"were there as many devils in Worms as tiles on its roofs 
I would enter." On his knees, amid friends, he prayed for 
grace, and then followed the herald that cited him to the as- 
sembly. He was asked as to the authorship of certain books, 
and then required to renounce them. He would not ; speaking 
calmly, first in German, then in Latin, refusing retractation, 
except as convinced of error by the Word of God, and closed : 
" Here I take my stand. I cannot do otherwise. So help me 
God !" Many violent friends of Rome and of the Emperor 
Charles Y. would have Luther burnt and his works thrown 
into the Rhine. In his later years Charles Y. is said to have 



192 ERAS AND CHARACTEltS OF HISTOBT. 

expressed regret that he did not violate his solemn safe-con- 
duct before given that Luther should be safe in visiting the 
diet. Charles V. pronounced, however, the ban of the empire. 
After three weeks the safe-conduct would expire. All were 
forbidden then to shield or feed him, his works were to be 
burnt, and Luther's friends were to be seized. 

On his quitting the diet, yet under the shelter of the unex- 
pired safe-conduct, Luther was, in the forest of Thuringia, 
not far from Eisenach, the old city of his second college, 
stopped by armed knights ; the dress of a knight was substi- 
tuted for his own ecclesiastical apparel, and he, not aware of 
the secret purpose of his escort, was carried a prisoner to the 
Castle of AVartburg, a fortified building on an eminence sur- 
rounded by woods. Most of his friends supposed him sacri- 
ficed by treachery. Ten months was Luther there : but not 
idly or despairingly. He busied himself in his great German 
version of the Bible from its original tongues, prepared in 
what he called " his Patmos." A cardinal, Archbishop of 
Mayence, prepared to renew the sale of indulgences. Luther, 
from his retirement, launched on it a philippic that made the 
cardinal quail and equivocate, promising to live as a pious 
bishop and Christian prince henceforth. 

But during these months of incarceration there were agita- 
tions and ferments, among the adherents of the new movement, 
that distressed him. Luther left his asylum to counteract these 
tendencies, without the leave of his patron and sovereign, the 
Elector. His appeals did much to quell the disturbance. His 
version appeared soon ; first, of the New Testament, exercising 
on the language of his people as well as on their faith an 
influence universally recognized, and not yet spent. Henry 



LUTUER AND HIS TIMES. 193 

YIII. of England, educated originally for a bishop's mitre, 
before the death of his elder brother had opened liis way to 
the crown, and proud of the knowledge of theology and the 
Fathers thus obtained, undertook to answer the " Babylonian 
Captivity " of Luther, heaping contumely fiercely on Luther, 
and declaring him worthy to be burnt. The Elector dreaded 
liis undertaking to answer a crowned antagonist. But Luther 
would not be persuaded. If the Tudor expected reverence 
for his regal position, he found in the sturdy German a 
doughty antagonist, who repaid insult with insult ; and Henry 
in vain appealed to the Elector to extirpate such heresy. 
Luther went on writing, and in one year launched one hun- 
dred and thirty treatises, and in the next year eighty-three, 
upon the world. Nobly and serenely the man of such pro- 
digious and unmitigable activity said, "Do not believe in 
Luther, but in Jesus Christ. I myself care nothing about 
Luther.'' Leo died. St. Peter's Cathedral is standing to our 
day ; but standing also is Luther's work, and moving and 
smiting, right and left, adown the centuries, the doctrines, and 
letters, and treatises, and texts, and Bibles that exposed the in- 
dulgences which had paid for that cathedral's construction. 
Stands too Luther's testimony, defying, in pontiffs' bulls and in 
edicts of emperors, the ban that would bind the Word of God. 
Say, in God's sight, who will and who dare, that the Reformer's 
paragraphs are not the nobler, braver, better, and more endur- 
ing work by far than is the dome which Michael Angelo lifted 
to the crown of that great cathedral, with all its affluence of 
painting, statuary, architecture, and costliness. The rim of that 
dome talks of Peter. The work of the true-hearted Reformer 
tells of a greater — Peter's Master and Saviour. 



194 ERAS AND CEABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Adrian VI., an old Netherlander, the friend and former 
teacher of the Emperor Charles V., was elected to succeed Leo, 
and proposed to " reform the Church by steps." " By steps," 
said Luther, " putting centuries between the steps." The con- 
troversy between Luther and Carlstadt and the Swiss Reform- 
ers, as to the nature of Christ's presence in the Lord's Sup- 
per, and the Peasants' War, followed. Bucer, in Switzerland, 
Melancthon, in Germany, aided, and yet in another light they 
also clogged him. His controversy with Erasmus brought 
Luther no literary reputation, and brought Erasmus no gain 
of theological fame. Erasmus, timorous and courtier-like, was 
engrossed in literary activity, and became less and less friendly 
to the cause of the Gospel that he had in earlier years favored. 
At the Diet of Spires measures were adopted for a future exe- 
cution of the edict of the Diet of Worms. To resist this 
virtual abrogation of the Gospel the friends of the Reformation 
and the enfranchised Bible presented, as rulers of the several 
states, and as representatives of several great towns, a solemn 
Protestation. It originated the name of Protestant, in 1529. 
In 1530 came the Diet of Augsburg; and the great confession 
there presented was the explanation of the Reformed doctrines, 
drawn up by Melancthon, and approved by Luther. Luther 
would have been willing to have been immolated, as was Huss 
at the Council of Constance, and became indignant when he 
found that Melancthon was inclined to temporize with the 
papal representative. 

In 1525 Luther had married Catherine von Bora, a nun, 
who with her sister nuns had adopted the Protestant doctrines 
and renounced the conventual vows. As a husband and fa- 
ther he was an exemplar of tenderness, simplicity, and fidelity. 



LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 195 

His letters to his little son, on God's garden and the leave to 
be asked from the owner that little Hans might come and 
play there ; his grief at the death of liis daughter Magdalena, a 
sorrow most touchingly and repeatedly expressed ; his general 
letters, a large and striking collection ; his hymns, which ring 
yet in German sanctuary and worship ; his hospitality amid 
narrow means ; as well as his fearlessness, and his untiring 
activity, as writer, teacher, preacher, and controversialist, show 
him a man of many-sided powers, and all dedicated, not with- 
out occasional and grave mistakes, indeed, but in singleness of 
intent generally, to the glory of the Master and his ransoming 
Cross, and presenting as the only righteousness the sinner's justi- 
fication by faith in that one Christ. "The Church," said he 
(and there he is indeed at variance with Rome and her edicts 
and principles), " is a poor sinner without Christ; not the 
Church, but Christ is the faith." Like Bunyan, he, the great 
Reformer, lost his life on an errand of the peace-maker — Bun- 
yan, the author of the "Pilgrim," in reconciling a son to the 
father whom he has offended and left ; Luther in a journey to 
Eisleben, his old birthplace, to make up a family variance 
amono: the household of the Counts of Mansfield. " Him I 
have taught, him I have confessed, him I love as my Saviour 
and Redeemer. . . . Take my poor soul up to thee." After 
uttering the words that so many Christians have used as their 
last utterance, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit " 
(the household of faith, in the train of their great Elder 
Brother, employing the words of his, the Master's, pallid lips), 
he expired in 1546, eleven years after Loyola had instituted 
the Order of the Jesuits, and in the very year when the Council 
of Trent meets. His body was removed from Eisleben to be 



196 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

interred in Wittenberg, where he had so long taught, and to 
the doors of whose church he had attached his ninety-five 
theses against indulgences. He had seen but sixty-three years ; 
but how much had he accomplished. 

Perhaps his "Table-talk" — the hastily uttered and often 
imperfectly narrated remarks of his meal-times, when he was 
to the poor student and the traveller a generous host and an 
ever accessible and affable talker — show most the raciness, the 
wit and kindliness, and the ruggedness and the honesty of his 
soul. Burns, the Scottish poet, was not more a man of the 
people, familiar with their hearts, ways, and blunt speech. 

In his controversy with the Reformers of Switzerland as to 
the real presence of Christ in the sacramental elements, there 
was a bitterness on his part that, however natural, was to be 
regretted ; and the effects of the dissension thus bred are not 
yet eliminated from the Reformed Churches of the Continent. 
In the grievances of the peasants, as breaking out in the Peas- 
ants' War, he took manfully at first the side of the oppressed 
tillers of the soil ; but against their rebellion he early set him- 
self. As against the views of the Holy Spirit and his offices 
in the Church, in his controversy with the Anabaptists, he took 
ground that, if more deliberate and less under provocation, he 
would probably have softened. There were those, of the nomi- 
nal adherents to his own Confession and the Protestant com- 
munion, who held the great truth of justification by faith, per- 
chance, as with Antinomian proclivities. The Baptist move- 
ment in that respect, had he regarded it (as in its beginning 
Melancthon was disposed to do) with favor or acquiescence, 
might have guarded the reception of the great doctrine of jus- 
tification by faith from Antinomian abuses, by making it hinge 



LUTRER AND HIS TIMES. 197 

■with, and revolve around, the great doctrine of regeneration, 
personally experienced, by the influence of the Spirit, invoked, 
and received, and obeyed. 

For the schools of Germany he accomplished much. The 
more accomplished but less daring disciple, who continued his 
work, Melancthon, did yet more, and has been called by grate- 
ful successors the School-master of Germany. "Worldly love 
and worldly lucre were not their objects of pursuit; and nei- 
ther hoarded of this world's goods more than did their great 
compeer — and reluctantly and reverently in some cases their 
opponent — in the Churches of France and Switzerland, Calvin. 

Dollinger, one of the most learned of men in Church his- 
tory, the Catholic scholar who has been prominent against the 
infallibility of the pontiff, had, in a work long preceding that 
controversy, gathered from a wide field, and with a keen eye 
and an apt hand, many instances of the abuses that, as even 
the great leaders complained, many Protestant scholars made 
of the great truth of faith only as justifying, as if it warranted 
license and led to depravation of morals. But the compari- 
son, as made over a yet more expanded field, and as continued 
through a yet longer tract of time, leaves the moral effect of 
the great Reformatory movement under Luther, far above the 
results of a general and an unquestioned and an intolerant Ro- 
manism. More than seventy years ago the French Institute 
offered a prize on the temper and influence of the Reformation 
under Luther. It was a body nominally Catholic, far as it was 
not sceptic, the Institute promulgating the offer. Villers, the 
author of the essay to which the prize was adjudged, was a 
Catholic by education, though some French scholars modify 
the effect of his judgment by intimating that he married a 

9* 



198 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Protestant lady. His work, translated into English, and repro- 
duced in Britain and America, shows how a scholar of such 
surroundings recognized the mighty and beneficent influence 
of this great movement, on the conscience and intelligence and 
heart of the nations. More recently, in our own day, Lave- 
laye, a publicist of high reputation, a professor in a Catholic 
university in Catholic Belgium, has written and sent out an 
able comparison of the relative influence of Catholicism and 
Protestantism on the nations, in which this acute and intelli- 
gent observer, looking out from a Catholic land, adjudges most 
largely the preponderance for good to be with the Protestant 
faith. It is to be regretted that an essay so worthy of wide 
currency has not found an American publisher, though its first 
appearance was coincident with the pamphlets of Gladstone 
on Vaticanism, which on this side of the Atlantic, as on the 
other, were so largely re-issued and read. 

But was Luther himself personally a Christian of a high 
order ? Bossuet, with his high talent and rare eloquence, has 
in his " History of Variations " represented Luther by citations 
not always cautious or over-honest from the Reformer's writ- 
ings. And in our own times a scholar of widest reading and 
rare keenness, the great Scottish metaphysician. Sir William 
Hamilton, allowed himself to cite and endorse these quotations 
from Luther at second hand and as found in Bossuet, as genuine 
and incontestable. It led to a reply by the late Archdeacon 
Julius C. Hare, an English scholar of ripe culture, and for some 
time resident in Germany. His defence of Luther, we think, 
showed very fully that Sir William Hamilton had allowed him- 
self without examination to adopt and reproduce as Luther's 
language much that Bossuet had grossly perverted, and that 



LUTHER AND HIS TUIES. 199 

Hamilton, had he but referred to Luther's own vokimes, could 
not have used in the sense which, as taught by Bossuet, he 
ascribed to them. The work of Ilare, now gone, was of that 
high ability that in Germany, Luther's own native country, its 
merit was acknowledged ; and the King of Prussia, brother 
and predecessor of the present sovereign and emperor, by his 
ambassador and friend, the late Chevalier Bunsen, sent to Hare 
the gift of a gold medal, as an expression of Germany's grati- 
tude to one who had thus vindicated the illustrious Reformer. 

Other scholars, less liable to the imputation of a Protestant 
bias from an English education, may be cited as bearing like 
evidence. The late French historian, Michclet, has also trans- 
lated the "Table-talk" of Luther, and written also a life of the 
great Saxon, marked with strong admiration of the man and of 
his labors for truth and the race. Another Frenchman, but a 
strong Catholic, M. Audin, has devoted an elaborate volume to 
the career of the great monk of Eisenach and Wittenberg, do- 
ing more justice than earlier Romanists to the high powers and 
many of the virtues of the great professor and teacher, who 
from Wittenbero; shook the world and launched his lio:htnino;- 
bolts against the Church of St. Peter's. But a Protestant read- 
er will, of course, in a treatise like that which M. Audin has 
devoted to Luther, as in his similar volume against Calvin, find 
much that he must disallow and repudiate, as strongly mis- 
judging and greatly misrepresenting this rugged and heroic 
character. 

A Protestant, of Swiss residence and German training and 
French origin, the late eminent and excellent Merle d'Au- 
bigne, in volumes too justly valued and too widely scattered to 
need larger reference, has presented winningly and, in our judg- 



200 ERA^ AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

ment, irrefragably, most of the great movements of the first 
heroic man, prophet-like in dignity and martyr-like in tempera- 
ment, whom God raised np to bring again the doctrines of 
Augustine and of Paul, the theological master of Augustine, 
and the doctrines of Paul's Master, the one head and teacher 
of the Church, into fresh remembrance before the peoples and 
tongues, who, in the name of an imaginary and perilous immo- 
bility, had allowed their communities to stagnate into most 
grievous and noisome superstitions. " The w^ord of God is not 
bound," "It abideth forever," were favorite mottoes of the 
monk of Eisenach and Wittenberg. And in Protestant mis- 
sions and Bible societies how vigorously and broadly has that 
divine Word received from Divine Providence its fresh com- 
mission to visit the benighted, and to enfranchise the imprison- 
ed and the down-trodden. 

And w^hen pontiffs in our owm days, sitting in the shadow 
of St. Peter's, have denounced, as did Gregory XVI., and as 
did Pius IX., the labors of these associations and their dif- 
fusion of the divine oracles, it is scarce needed that the 
friends of Luther should apologize for the strength and 
sharpness of some of his controversial utterances. How, 
against the quiet translation and distribution of the Book 
that prophets and apostles by divine inspiration wrote, for 
all times and lands, has the authority, affecting infallibility, 
and presiding over a Church that claims unity and unchange- 
ableness, rolled out vaticinations of invective that Luther's 
sternest words scarce equal in severity and bitterness, when 
denouncing the antagonism of what he believed to be God's 
truth. Luther never claimed such personal infallibility. See 
the sacrifices and perils by which some of these missionary 



LUTHER AND HIS TUIES. 201 

versions have been framed, and the wide-reaching charity that 
has labored to carry the book to the cannibal's hut and the 
side of the pyre where living widows were burnt by the 
corpse of a dead husband. And as we remember what God 
lias already done by the books, and for their readers and prayer- 
ful students, a candid collation of the divine and the human 
— of what the Christ, head of the Church on high, has said, 
and of what the human potentate, affecting to represent and 
explain him on the earth, has said — may well cause us to turn 
with a calm, sad earnestness from the councils and thrones 
when the edict of banning and of execration is proclaimed, 
with the exclamation of the dying patriarch upon our lips, 
" Unto their assembly, O my honor, be not thou united." 

For the union that truly relieves and establishes the Church 
is that of a divine life. It is a book, but not as locked in dead 
tongues ; but a book open to every reader and addressing itself 
to every conscience, that it be searched and collated and heeded 
and obeyed. The unchangeableness of councils and pontiffs is 
imaginary and supposititious. Wildest strife and foulest scan- 
dals have at times flecked and drenched this alleged unity and 
indefectibility of the conclave and the tiara. But trust the sin- 
gle soul to the one unchanging, omniscient, and omnipresent 
Saviour pledged to be with his people to the end of the world. 
Thus trusting in the Christ, indefectible and eternal, we come 
imploring and experiencing and obeying the monitions of that 
Paraclete — first author of that revelation and ever ready to 
answer the supplication of its docile and loyal reader. And 
here we have, in the one head, invisible but real, of the 
Church militant and the Church triumphant, and in the 
agency, free and living, exhaustless and unerring, of that Spirit 



202 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

who came down in Pentecost — we have, alike for the solitary 
believer and the assembled disciples thus moored to the one 
Rock and held by the one Spirit, a hope " sure and steadfast." 
It is a hope surer than twenty centuries of (Ecumenical councils 
could make it; it is a hope steadfast with the steadfastness 
of that God who is in one mind and none can turn him. And 
the soul thus moored in the eternal anchorage upon the infinite 
and unmovable verities has the perfection of the Godhead as 
the warrant of confidence. Such a trust, passing out of the 
reach of Inquisition and martyr-stake and martyr-rack, has gone 
" within the vail whither the forerunner is for us entered, even 
the Jesus, a high-priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." 
The synodal and the oecumenical documents, that essay to 
reproduce on the earth this eternity and impeccability inher- 
ing only in the true Melchizedek, are valueless at the bar to 
which we tend. As to development, which has bewitched 
some minds, its exemplification in the individual or in the 
Church is not encouraging. We recognize identity in the 
thinker and writer, under the growth of maturer years, and 
the decrepitude and wrinkles of extremest age; but shall we 
therefore idealize as glories in that identity the enlargement 
given to limb and frame by the dropsy ; the efflorescence, red 
and fiery, of the cancer ; the erosions, ghastly and revolting, of 
the leprosy ? We may hail, in the Church, what is true ; but 
what is abnormal and diseased — not according to the divine 
record, not attested and attended by the renewing and sancti- 
fying Spirit (however attached to old and venerable associa- 
tions) — we regard as the development of disease, the old life, 
invaded and perverted by the incipient death. We accept no 
such standard of beauty or vigor or health. 



LUTUER AND HIS TIMES. 203 

To the law and the testimony. Thither Luther went, for 
thither Luther's Master sent him, and sends us. Far as that 
Book of that Emmanuel — and of that Spirit, as unfolding and 
irradiating the book — sustains a doctrine, a communion, or a 
rite, we revere the divine authority. But if this standard re- 
pudiates the opinion or practice, then, though scores of Sanhe- 
drims favor it with their benediction — though against its ques- 
tioners councils of Trent and councils of the Vatican thunder 
their anathema — we turn to an authority paramount, perma- 
nent, and immovable. If not thus written, if not thus avouch- 
ed, the usage, however long descended and widely sanctioned, 
is to be denounced. " There is no truth in them," when the 
Christ and the Paraclete and the oracle all fail them. 

The German and the English speaking people have a large 
share in the literature, commerce, science, liberties, and history 
of the world. If equally loyal to the faith of the incarnate 
Saviour, heaven, as well as earth, is the heritage set before 
them. 

From the Patraos, as he termed it, of Luther's "Wartburg 
issued the first instalment of the German Bible, that went so 
far and has done so much. From the old Patmos, where Do- 
mitian had penned John, came the Apocalypse, the chapters 
which shut up Revelation. He who walked there — the true 
and faithful Witness — we are credibly informed, is living yet. 
From each new impediment and barrier cast in the path of 
his people — banned, and proscribed, and excommunicated — he 
is able to minister, in all the far future, new deliverances and 
victories, that shall ultimately brighten into the glories of the 
upper Paradise, the rest that remaineth for his people, dark- 
ened by no error. 



204 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Luther was under the ban of the Pope and the ban of the 
Empire. The Inquisition had the approval of the power that 
banned thus our older worthies; the great Spanish Armada, 
dubbed Invincible, had the solemn benediction of the same 
infallible potentate. It blessed the Stuarts, and they lost the. 
British throne. It blessed the massacre of St. Bartholomew 
and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; but both slaughter 
and revocation have gone into history under another light than 
that in which the Infallible and Immutable would have placed 
them. The Syllabus has banned Bible societies and religious 
toleration, and pronounced solemnly for the infallibility of the 
Roman pontifE in the person of the aged pontiff, as compared 
with some of his predecessors, the less intelligent and the more 
superficial Pius IX. What says the w^ord of God in the mat- 
ter of claims so novel and yet so sweeping ? 



JOHN CALVIN. 205 



X. 

JOHN CALVIX. 

By the estimate alike of the friends and of the antagonists 
of that great movement in the religious history of the world 
which is generally called the Reformation, the name of Calvin 
stands next to that of Luther, in the vastness of his labors 
and the wide scope of his influence. The range of the power 
wielded by the monk of Wittenberg has run mainly through 
the people using the German language. From the impulse 
given by the efforts and character of the younger laborer has 
gone out a continuous energy, felt not merely in his native 
France, and in French Switzerland, the land of his adoption, 
but through Northern Italy, and through Holland, and in Brit- 
ain, both the English and the Scottish portions of the island, 
and all the colonies of Britain and Ilolland, alike in our own 
West and in the ancient East. AYherever the Eno-lish tono-ue 
has become prevalent by the settlements and conquests of the 
stalwart Anglo-Saxon — wherever the Huguenot refugees, flung 
from France by the perfidious and tyrannous revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes, have lighted on European or American soil, 
and carried the French tongue to the new homes of the exile 
— the memory of John Calvin has travelled. The relative 
share of these tongues — German, English, and French — in the 
literature and intercourse of the future is a matter of debate 
yet to be determined. A half-century since, the tongue of po- 



206 ERAS AND CUARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

lite France seemed likely to become the language of diplomacy 
and fashion over the civilized world. Bat since that recent 
date the wide diffusion of the English traffic and colonization 
and freedom has given to their tongue a broader currency, 
which it is little likely to surrender or to see materially nar- 
rowed. And though the rich augmentations made by German 
genius, both to the literature and the science of modern civili- 
zation, have rendered the mastery of its speech more and more 
desirable to the scholar, even German scholars, with all their 
patriotic admiration of their native tongue, have held it proba- 
ble that the English has higher promise and greater adaptation, 
for its being made the dialect of the world's ultimate civiliza- 
tion and of the world's final fraternization. Into both the 
French and the English language, the story of Calvin and his 
teachings and institutions is more deeply wrought than that of 
the heroic and devoted Luther even. Far as the books and 
institutions of any people give pledge of shaping the future, 
the literature of England and of France is, to man's judgment, 
more sure of holding and of moulding the ages that are to 
come, than even the rich and the varied literature of Germany. 
In the year 1509, when Luther began in his professor's chair 
at the University of Wittenberg to give lectures on Scripture, 
which attracted general attention throughout Germany — but 
two years before the time when, in the service of his order, 
Luther made that visit to Rome, the Eternal City, which so 
deeply impressed him, and when he climbed on his knees Pi- 
late's Stairs — but two years before this stair-climbing, we say, 
there was born in Picardy, a northern province of France, in 
the town of Noyon, an infant son to a notary. The father, not 
a man of large means, but having some influential connections 



JOHN CALVm. 207 

-with the Churcli and the aristocracy of the region, endeavored 
to give his son, John Calvin, a good education. This was se- 
cured in part by the lad's sharing the studies of the children of 
the noble family of Montmorenci, and in part by the father's 
securing for this mere boy a place in the Church by the bishop's 
favor — an abuse of the times, giving boys not yet adolescent 
rank as Church teachers, when they had not age or capability to 
become as yet more than learners of the first elements. Sent 
to Paris, he had there the instructions of Corderius, famous to 
many after generations of school-boys for his Latin Colloquies, 
a school-book now disused. But though tonsured, or shorn on 
the crown of the head, for orders, the lad was not in orders ; 
and the father, judging that his talents promised success in a 
more remunerative profession, that of the law, would have him 
study jurisprudence. In this, too, the youth showed great ap- 
titude; and the eminent Alciat, one of the great jurists of the 
age, was among his instructors, and he became a Doctor of the 
Law. Such was his marked proficiency, even before his thus 
attaining the degree, that, in the absence of one of his profess- 
ors, L'Estaples, he occupied before his fellow-students occa- 
sionally the vacant chair of their teacher. On the death of his 
father he abandoned the pursuit of the law, to which he had 
turned in obedience to that father's wishes ; yet the training 
thus given to his intellect was, in God's wise leading, bene- 
ficial in his after devotion to religious and scriptural themes. 
A kinsman, Olivetan, afterward the first translator of the Bible 
into French, recommended to him the study of the Bible. At 
the college where he had Alciat for his teacher in jurispru- 
dence he met Wolmar, who tauo;ht him Greek and brouo-ht 
him to the study of the New Testament in that language. He 



208 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

described, years after, in his Preface to tlie Psalms, his conver- 
sion as sudden. Religion became now his absorbing pursuit; 
and though, as he frankly expresses it, liis taste and bearing- 
were somewhat clownish, or " subrustic," flavored with awk- 
wardness, to use his classical phrase, he became the resort and 
counsellor of other students who were like-minded. But his 
studies were intemperately pursued to midnight, followed by a 
reofular review of what he had last learned, and then resumed 
at a very early hour on the next morning. This consuming 
zeal laid the foundation for the disorders which made his later 
years those of continuous suffering, and led to his compara- 
tively early death. Calvin had been but a boy of some eight 
years old when Luther nailed on the church door at Witten- 
bers: his memorable theses ao'ainst the abuses of indulo-ences. 
The storms, that were gradually increasing in volume and in 
darkness throughout Germany, must have more or less rever- 
berated around the French home and college life of the youth 
who was destined to become so powerful an ally in the great 
movement. AVhen by the decease of his father released from 
the jurist career, for which his acuteness of mind and tenac- 
ity of purpose so fitted him to shine, and left free to fol- 
low the guidance of conscience in those religious studies and 
avocations for which the ambitious hopes of his father had 
induced him to turn for a time aside, Calvin's absorption in 
religious questions and duties was hailed with delight by those 
of his friends who had imbibed a relish for the Gospel, and 
whose interest was strongly enlisted for that reform in the 
Churcli which the best men on all sides acknowledged to be so 
greatly needed. Though studious and by preference retired, 
Calvin seems to have attracted, by his principles and temper, 



JOHN CALVIN. 209 

the favor of many in the leading classes of the nation. For a 
time he was sheltered by the influence of Margaret of Navarre, 
the sister of Francis I. of France ; and when finding it neces- 
sary to quit France, he was for a time in the court of Renee, 
Duchess of Ferrara, herself an adherent of the new opinions. 
She, a daughter of Louis XIL, a former King of France, was a 
woman of high worth, but in her religious sentiments she had 
not the sympathy of her consort, the duke. Calvin had passed 
to a residence in Switzerland, where his talents and consecration 
of purpose had awakened for him the strong regard of friends 
of the Reformation. He came to Geneva, intending, as he says, 
to pass but a night there and continue his journey ; but Farel, 
a man of great zeal, and as a preacher of more popular gifts 
than Calvin, but not of Calvin's grasp of intellect or depth of 
learning, was strongly impressed with the powers and worth of 
the young scholar ; and with something of that sternness and 
celestial majesty, as of one of the old prophets, whicli marked 
the character and bearing of Farel, he denounced on Calvin 
the divine displeasure, declaring that the curse of God, if he 
refused to abide and occupy that field, would rest on bim as 
on "one seeking rather himself than Christ." Thus adjured 
and admonished, the young French scholar, but twenty-eight 
years old, consented to remain, and was soon appointed teacher 
of theology. A career thus begun, as athwart his own indi- 
vidual preferences and his former purposes of life, but usher- 
ing in so wide a sphere of labor, and leading to results alike so 
extended and so enduring, might well furnish to his own mind 
an illustration of that great truth of the divine foreordination, 
which looms up so largely in the theology and writings of the 
great Swiss Reformer. His classical studies had given him 



210 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

command of a style, admired even in that age, ^vhen so many- 
eminent classical scholars were found in Continental Europe. 
He had formed it, it has been said by some of his biographers, 
and continued to maintain it, by the assiduous study of the 
works of the great Roman orator and moralist Cicero. But 
other men, like Erasmus and Sadolet and Bembo, were men 
thought to have effectually acquired the peculiarities of the 
Ciceronian idiom, in whose mind the flow and grace of expres- 
sion was put to no such high uses as those to which Calvin 
had dedicated his days and toils and entire soul. 

He had, in France and in Italy, been in peril for his religious 
opinions, and martyrdom was the gate into which the zealous 
and fearless confessors of Christ might in that age be sum- 
moned suddenly to walk. Of habits of^life and apparel sim- 
ple and self-denying to austerity, if not to positive asceticism, 
Calvin was a man of stern convictions, walking with a loftier 
sense of ever-incumbent duty than ever bound Simon Stylites 
to his fantastic pillar — in the words of a fellow-Protestant long 
after, the British Milton, walking " as ever in his great Task- 
master's eye." And he had studied that great Task-master's 
words, and pondered his divine example, and implored, too 
earnestly and penitently, that master's prompting Spirit, that 
he should be willing to accept as his stint of obligation, as his 
solemn and glorious " task," the mere pattering of beads, or 
standing on a lofty column to meet the applauding but stolid 
gaze of superstitious crowds ; as if thus the great cross-bear- 
ing Brother were to be effectively honored, and the vast mass 
of the estranged multitude were to be won into the open 
Kingdom of Heaven. Without Luther's command of the pop- 
ular style of his countrymen, without the personal magnetism, 



JOHN CALVIN. 211 

hearty and homely and rugged, by which the AYittenberg Re- 
former attached the crowds to his pulpit and his person, Cal- 
vin relied on the grave presentation of important truths in the 
most thorough and impressive style. More a scholar and 
more a recluse than his great Saxon prototype, but also less a 
man of the people, and less conversant with the people's jests, 
proverbs, and apothegms, he was, withal, a profounder thinker, 
and a reasoner whose arguments hung, as by links of steel, to 
one another. That he had the power of attaching students 
and friends, who saw him intimately and who saw him long, 
wdth enduring bonds to himself, is evidenced from the testi- 
mony of men like Beza and like Knox, who had thus observed 
him narrowly and nearly. Not capable of blundering, as Lu- 
ther sometimes did, into inconsistency, yet when Calvin took 
up a wrong conclusion in practice he followed it up, with a 
self-denying indifference to the sacrifice of feeling that it in- 
volved, which to other minds seemed cruelty and arrogance, 
when, on his part, it was the resolute adherence to what he 
supposed principle not to be on any account surrendered. A 
strong will both had; but in the German Reformer it was 
sailor-like bluffness ; in the Swiss it seemed to the subjects of 
its severity like the jailer's hard-heartedness. 

AVhen yet in France Calvin had prepared an edition of the 
old Roman Seneca on " Clemency," with the indirect purpose, 
as some thought, of swaying Francis I., then upon the French 
throne, the rival of Charles V. for European predominance, to 
thoughts of greater kindliness toward the nascent Reforma- 
tion. If this was the purpose, it was not avowed, and the in- 
direct aim was not attained. He sought it, more ably and 
with fullest frankness, in the preparation of his great work on 



212 i^^AS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

theology, the " Institutes." This he inscribed to the French 
king, in a dedication that, in its own day and long afterward, 
was regarded as one of the masterpieces of literature, in the 
form of the dedication, as a porch to a book putting high the 
patron's name in the forefront of the volume it opens. Schol- 
ars bailed as the three great dedications of European literature 
Casaubon's introduction to his Livy, De Thou's to his History 
of France, and that of Calvin to his " Institutes of Theology ;" 
all three writers were French by nativity, and two of them 
were Protestants, and the third, De Thou, though a Catholic, 
so liberal and outspoken that his immortal history incurred 
the ill-will of many Romanists. But Calvin, in his dedication, 
endeavored to divert from his fellow-religionists the accusation 
of sedition against the monarch. By successive revisions and 
improvements, the " Institutes " were rendered one of the most 
perfect, as to logical connection, of all systems of theology 
ever issued. 

In his address to the French king, who, becoming allied by 
his political interests to some of the Protestant princes of Ger- 
many, was inclined to represent his measures of repression 
against Protestantism in France as being not so much against 
religious error as against political sedition, the illustrious Re- 
former had said, in replying to the imputation of novelty, as 
brought against Reform : " When they call ours a new religion 
they mock God, whose Holy "Word never has deserved to be 
held suspected of innovations. For those only is our religion 
a new thing to whom Christ and his Gospel are something new. 
Because of their own ignorance they hold our religion some- 
thing dubious and uncertain. But much as they may jeer at 
the uncertainty thereof, whenever they shall be prepared to 



JOHN CALVIN. 213 

seal their own faith with their own blood men will discern 
how high they in truth prize it. Of quite another kind is 
our persuasion, which shrinks not either from the fear of 
present death or from the throne of God's judgment here- 
after."* 

Geneva, where Calvin commenced his career, then had cast 
off the power of the Duke of Savoy, and also ejected its 
bishop, who was little worthy of respect for his character 
personally, and whose policy was, in connection with that of 
the Duke of Savoy, directed to the overthrow of the city's 
liberties. But Calvin, when installed a teacher there, found 
the community little inclined to accept the moral reforms 
which were necessary to Christian purity, and to abiding free- 
dom as well ; and, after a period of three years, he and his 
fellow-teachers were required to leave the city and pass into 
exile. Calvin passed first to Basle, and after to Strasburg, 
preaching in the French church there and lecturing on theol- 
ogy. Sadolet, a Catholic bishop, had endeavored to win back 
Geneva to the Romish faith during Calvin's absence ; but 
Calvin published a reply to the bishop's letter, which disap- 
pointed the scholarly prelate and left his efforts utterly fruit- 
less. In three years his old flock had seen sufficiently the 
moral results of their rashness to desire the return of their 
pastor; reversed the decree of banishment, and penitently 
asked in earnestness for his return. In every alternate week 
he preached each day ; on three days in the week taught theol- 
ogy ; read the Scriptures in the congregation, attended weekly 
the meetings of his consistory ; prepared commentaries on the 

* Herzog. Theol. Real. Encyclop. Bd. II. p. 513. 
10 



214 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

books of Scripture ; held numerous controversies, and main- 
tained a widely extended correspondence. He had, in fact, 
become the oracle and adviser, consulted from all quarters of 
Protestant Europe. As he wrote to a friend, "I have not 
time to look out at the blessed sun. . . . When I have settled 
ray usual business I have so many letters to write, so many 
questions to answer, that many a night is spent without any 
offering of sleep to exhausted nature." Many of those com- 
mentaries on Scripture, which are yet consulted with so just a 
reverence, for their power of holding and presenting the cur- 
rent of connected thought in the mind of the prophet or the 
apostle, whose words are the subject of commentary, were but 
the shorthand writers' reports of oral expositions delivered by 
the great scholar in his desk to his pupils in theology. To 
crowned heads in England and Scotland he addressed, at their 
request or as emergency seemed to demand it, epistles or dedi- 
cations that made the humble desk beside the Geneva Lake 
part of the council-chamber of some powerful nation or distin- 
guished sovereign. He occupied till the Master came, but not 
with the self -recruiting intervals of retirement and refreshment 
which that Master, amid his own divine energies, inculcated 
and enforced on his apostles when else they had not leisure so 
much as to eat bread. It was a daily martyrdom that, however 
honest in purpose, was lavish, if not suicidal, in its measure and 
in its final results ; for, at the age of fifty-five, under a compli- 
cation of spleen, and asthma, and gout, and the scholar's old 
complaint, as it was then called, the stone or gravel, he sunk to 
the tomb, " spent in over-service " — as truly an oblation on the 
sacrifice and service of the newly-recovered Gospel as was the 
apostle's, the Paul, whom in so many traits he resembled, 



JOHN CALVIK 215 

when making Lis own blood, gladly and heroically shed before 
Nero, a libation upon the confession of the Churches whom he 
had gathered in far provinces of the empire, and whose needs 
he remembered in the prayers of his dungeon, and whose igno- 
rance he instructed in epistles that the manacled hands in- 
scribed, when, as Christ's prisoner, he awaited the time of his 
being offered up. 

AVhile at Strasburg, Calvin had launched a French version of 
the Bible, though mainly the work of his kinsman Olivetan, 
yet revised by the Reformer himself, and therefore bearing his 
name. Most of his great works were in Latin, though he 
wrote also in French ; and some recent critics have attributed 
to Calvin somethinoj of a like share in forrainix modern French 
that belongs beyond all question to Luther in forming and fix- 
ing, by his own German Bible, the modern German. And, 
indeed, any dialect, raised from merely secular and trivial top- 
ics, to deal with and present worthily the great topics of 
eternity and duty and salvation and God, must in the hands 
of writers of any fair competency put on new vigor and dig- 
nity. The range of its idioms is not only widened, but the 
force and pith of its expressions are elevated and intensified by 
this intermeddling with themes of greater moment and solem- 
nit}'. The tongue becomes baptized as from a new and higher 
Castalia. The speech of the mart and the truckster's booth be- 
comes the dialect of sacred hymn and of dying confession. It 
prays, and it lives by the upward -aspiration. 

A man so engrossed with his work would have little leisure 
for the amenities and the repose of domestic life. Study, con- 
troversy, and the care of all the Churches upon him, as Paul 
said plaintively many centuries before in his own case, would 



216 -E'^^-^ ^y-D CEARACTEBS OF HISTORY. 

leave him scant season to know tbe worth of the family hearth 
and it5 ofatherinofs. He married Idolette de Bure. It is a sio'- 
nificant comment on the fierce and wild aspersions of immoral- 
ity lavished on the early Anabaptists, a body with whom Cal- 
vin was himself bronght into controversy, oral and written, 
that this partner of the Reformer's joys and sorrows was her- 
self the widow of an Anabaptist, and, as some say, an Ana- 
baptist pastor. If they were the foul herd of Silenus and of 
Comus, which some paint the body, it would seem unaccount- 
able that the illustrious Reformer, after engaging several of his 
friends to interpose their good ofiices in securing him a fit 
helpmate for his home, should have been left to plight hand 
and troth with one of that community. She is said to have 
been the mother of children by her first marriage. To the 
Reformer she bore but one. The loss of this child, and after- 
ward of its mother, to whom he seems to have been sincerely 
attached, grieved him ; but he carried his woes in this, as in all 
other regards, to the throne of grace and the field of Christian 
toil, the closet and the teacher's desk. 

He was not only indefatigable, but it must in all frankness 
be said he was immitigable, in the purpose to crowd into the 
narrow limits of the earthly life all possible witnessing for 
God's discredited truth, and all accessible work for the diffu- 
sion of that truth among the nations. 

There are those to whom the memory of Calvin is asso- 
ciated inseparably, if not solely, with the name of Servetus as 
his victim. It must be allowed that the great but rash Span- 
ish physician, intimate from his nativity in the Iberian penin- 
sula with the Moor and the Jew, dreamed most wildly, in con- 
sequence, of an idle and unwarranted recasting of Christianity 



JOHN CALVIX. 217 

•wbich should undeify the Saviour and Judge of the world, and 
so pave the way for reconciling Hebrew and Moslem to an un- 
divine teacher, who would, in the very recasting of his own 
statements, be proved no longer the Light of the World ; for, 
as Lessing long after said, in his unbelief, if Christ were not 
divine, he, the Christ, said so much, looking to an assumption 
of Deity, that, in that respect, Mahomet himself were a more 
consistent and safe leader ; for Mahomet evidently and explic- 
itly never claimed the Godhead, while Jesus said at least many 
things, as Lessing phrased it, which bear that interpretation. 
But Servetus was fierce and harsh of utterance, and had said 
much that must, to a devout receiver of the evangelical faith, 
seem sheer blasphemy. As a blasphemer by the law of Gene- 
va Servetus was cited, and condemned, and executed. We fear 
that the share of Calvin in effecting the arrest is incontroverti- 
ble. That ho would have softened the form of death has been 
alleged, but the accounts are perplexed. "With all his services 
to the cause of evangelical truth on the one hand, and to the 
cause of political freedom in the young Republic of Geneva on 
the other hand, it is yet undeniable that Calvin, like many of 
the worthies of his age, failed to read aright the Master's ut- 
t<3rance, " My kingdom is not of this world." But that such 
especial energy of denunciation should be lavished on the Re- 
former for this, an error inherent so generally in the senti- 
ments of his age, while so little is said by the same irapugn- 
crs against his contemporary, Francis L, saying that he would 
burn his own son at the stake and carry wood for the purpose, 
were he found guilty of heresy, and against his contemporary, 
Philip IL of Spain, inviting his court to the spectacle of the 
solemn burning of Inquisitorial victims in the auto-da-fe, as 



218 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

an act of regal piety ; and while, too, so little is said against 
the burning of Arians in Protestant England under James L, 
and in the days of Bacon, Lord Yerulam — in a day still later 
tlian Calvin's, and in a time comparatively of greater illumina- 
tion in this matter of relicjious toleration — seems to us an in- 
stance of strange lack of impartiality. Indeed, so general was 
the feeling of alarm and detestation aroused by violent de- 
nunciations against the Trinity, that Protestant sovereigns and 
Protestant doctors almost held it requisite, to the vindication 
of the Reformation against the imputation by the Romish 
Church of comphcity with impiety, that they should thus, as 
in blood, lave out the stain of the accusations which Rome, 
by many a writer, brought against the Reformation that it, 
with Mahometanism, was leagued to thrust Christ from the 
throne of heaven. 

There was a book, in its day, of currency, and of no little 
ability, that has in this respect an instructive history. It was 
the " Calvino-Turcismus" of William Reynolds, an English con- 
vert to Rome, who left his native Britain, in consequence, after 
receiving his education there, and became a teacher in the 
Romish English Seminary at Douay. That seminary was for 
the training of English Catholic priests, to be sent back to 
England to plot revolutions against the government, and to 
restore the old subjection of the British isles to the Roman 
faith and see. His history was a peculiar one. He was the 
brother of that Dr. John Reynolds, one of the most learned 
Puritans of England, who had a great share in obtaining the 
preparation of the received English version. John Reynolds, 
a man of great personal worth, and one of the ripest scholars 
of Europe in a very scholarly age, was the author of many 



JOHN CALVIN. 219 

works of vast erudition ; and one of these, on the Apocrypha, 
a German scholar has, within a very few years, cited in his own 
work on this theme of the Apocrypha, as yet one of the very 
best and most exhaustive treatises on the subject. Thomas 
Fuller, the Church historian, reproduced the current tale, that 
each brother had been originally in the other fjiith than that 
in which he ultimately settled ; that the one brother, in attempt- 
ing to proselyte his kinsman, had lost the faith he would teach, 
and accepted the other which he would at first have impugned. 
According to this untrustworthy story, John, the chief scholar, 
had been a Romanist converted to Puritanism in the recoil of 
his own attempt to propagate Romanism ; and William, the 
refugee, had been originally a good Protestant, who lost his 
first creed and took up his brother's Romanism when John 
abandoned it. But this mutual reaction in conversion is with- 
out any legitimate basis of evidence, and is now generally and 
justly rejected. John, the great scholar, never was a Roman- 
ist; but William had been, and bestowed much effort and 
study in his book to show that the system of Calvin is one, 
in guilt and moral results, with the fatalism of the Turks as 
imbibed from the Koran. W^e suppose that any judicious and 
candid observer of Mahometan society, and any patient stu- 
dent of the Moslem history, must acknowledge that the great 
truths of the divine sovereignty — the vast overarching sway 
and survey of Heaven, as foreseeing all events and ultimately 
meting out all destinies and results : as far as these truths 
have been, by the nation or by the individual recognizing the 
Koran, the subject of prolonged meditation and the motives 
of moral action — may have conduced to the heroic and fixed 
characteristics that are found in so many details of Saracen 



220 Eli AS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and Turkish history. A belief in God's constant and sleepless 
supervision, no matter how many and grave the deadly errors, 
intermingled with that truth so believed, may have its marked 
effects, to restrain, to impel, to uplift, and to consolidate the 
human spirit, accepting that rule and cleaving to that grand 
truth. 

But the attempt to identify Calvinism, with its worship of 
a divine and suffering Redeemer, as being one with Mahom- 
etanism, which denies the divinity of Jesus and the reality of 
his death, is, however patient and able, a foregone absurdity. 
A contemporary scholar, the English Dean Sutclive, answered 
it, though anonymously, with much point, and the statements 
that Sutclive, as of his own personal knowledge, makes against 
the personal character and morals of Bishop Bonner, one of 
the chief Romanist persecutors in England, who fed the fires 
of Smithfield so ruthlessly, with victims so holy and illustrious, 
may w^ell be pondered ; and, if it be in their power, answered 
by Romanists, w^ho, because of a common faith in the divine 
predestination, would confound the doctrine of Calvin with 
the creed of the Koran. It is Romanism that has been from 
the beginning, and is to this day, in its invocation of saints 
and worship of images, and in its idolatrous exaltation of 
Christ's mother to the throne of her divine Son, in its oppres- 
sions of the Moor and its betrayal of the Greek, in its pilgrim- 
ages, and its crusades, and its idolatrous use of the Holy Land, 
responsible for very much of the obduracy and the inacces- 
sibility of the Moslem mind when approached by the Gospel 
of Christ. Henry IV. of France, after becoming a pervert to 
Rome, and after having been in youth a pupil and confessor 
of Protestantism, held, knowing both systems — the Romish and 



JOHN CALVIN. 221 

the Protestant — that it "svas the Protestant form of Christianity 
which was most likely to win and enlighten the Mahometan. 
As the judgment of one who knew St. Bartholomew's night, 
and was to fall, though he then knew it not, by the dagger 
of the Romanist fanatic, Ravaillac, the opinion of Henry of 
Navarre is worthy of some respect as to the moral weight of 
Calvinism before the Saracen and the Turk. 

It should, in justice to the character of the great teacher of 
Geneva, be remembered that he was himself no Antinomian — 
a man of reckless and vicious habits. The Romanist authors, 
whose estimate of Luther w^e quoted in a former lecture, the 
Abbe Glaire and the Yicomte Walsh, in their article on 
Calvin, repudiate the thought of giving echo or credence to 
the vituperations of some Romanist authors against the moral 
character of Calvin. And yet the Jesuits, who as a body 
have prided themselves on their culture of Latin poetry, and 
who have ventured to call the immortal denunciations of their 
own Jesuit casuistry and morality, in the "Provincial Letters" 
of Pascal, the unrivalled and the unanswerable — " the immortal 
liars" have made it their especial delight to accredit and to 
diffuse these false imputations against the illustrious Genevese 
Reformer. The illustrious Pascal proved it upon some of their 
great teachers that they, the Jesuit doctors, have held it law- 
ful to coin and to circulate known falsehoods against those 
who may injure or offend members of the order. In the case 
of Calvin, at least, fellow -Catholics, like the authors of this 
Catholic encyclopaedia, writing in modern Catholic Paris, dis- 
avow this atrocious libel on a man of high, stern, pure charac- 
ter, who lived in the eye of all Europe, under the fierce light 
of observation, both of friends and foes, so incessant and so 

10- 



222 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

intense ; and who died poor, when inconsistency, or covetous- 
ness, or ambition would have made him affluent and sovereign, 
the wearer of a mitre perchance, or the aspirant even to the 
tiara. For the so-called chair of St. Peter has been occupied 
by no man, be he Gregory VII. or Innocent III. or Sixtus V., 
who was, in breadth of intellect, the equal of John Calvin. 
Since the days of Augustine no teacher of the Church, not 
Bernard or St. Thomas Aquinas or Bellarraine, has displayed 
such power of bringing concentrated thought upon great 
religious themes into symmetric and logical cohesion as this 
same Calvin. And add to Calvin the theologian, the merits, 
rare and high, of Calvin as the expositor, we suppose that 
Augustine is not his peer. More of the touching eloquence 
of the heart both Bernard and Augustine had ; but, in the 
other merits of the systematic and philosophical theologian, 
and the acute and perspicuous expositor of Scripture, neither 
of these good and great men is the peer of that austere, grave, 
sad-eyed reclase, dying by the Leman Lake, and leaving his 
property of a few hundred crowns to poor scholars and his 
colleague and the children of his brother, a simple book- 
binder. 

There is a prejudice among very good men, Protestants and 
men of true worth, scholarship, and piety, against Calvin. We 
are bidden by a higher than Calvin's authority to call no man 
master beside Christ. But it should be remembered that, in 
its essence, the system of the great Genevan teacher radiated 
from one very simple truth. It was, that God is the owner of 
the world which he himself made — that he has full cognizance 
of all its history, to the tiniest atom of its elements, and to the 
uttermost hour of its duration ; and that, seeing as he does 



JOHN CALVIN. 223 

" the end from the beginning," lie will provide that the ulti- 
mate results of his government shall not be failure. The way 
in which human liberty and responsibility have their free de- 
velopment within the all-surrounding hem of the divine con- 
trol, changeless in its wisdom, and omniscient in its purview, 
and omnipresent in its witnessing, is a mystery which, we sup- 
pose, the intellect of man and even of angel cannot adequately 
comprehend, much less formulate. All of sin is in the aposta- 
sy, wilful and inexcusable, of man and angel from the end of 
the Creator. All of good is, in its first germ, of grace ; and 
must, in its loftiest culmination of excellence, and in its latest 
utterance of exultation, give out its verdict for the divine glory, 
untarnished and irreproachable. Specks of gloom will start 
out upon the finite and human mind in facing the orbed maj- 
esty of the Godhead ; but the darkness is in the eye beholding, 
not in the blazing orb which it beholds. The specks are of 
the earthly optic, not of the divine and celestial vision. Gro- 
tius may have complained, and Wesley and the holy Fletcher 
of Madeley, all learned and wise and devout men, against cer- 
tain statements of Calvin, and in certain phrases of Calvin he 
may have been justly criticised ; but the sovereignty of grace 
is, after all, the one sure hope of the world. Back of Calvin 
and back of Augustine lies Paul and the ever true and ever 
worthy Master and Redeemer and Judge of Paul, the Christ of 
the Nativity, and the Passion, and the Resurrection, and the 
great white Throne. 

Geneva has reared its monument for Rousseau ; but for a 
more illustrious citizen, Calvin, though it shows the cathedral 
where he preached, and the house where he is said to have 
lived, it cannot tell where he was buried. It was well that the 



224 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

man who wrote so effectively against relics in the w^orsliip of 
the Romish Church should have disappointed in his own case 
the worshippers of relics, by leaving an unmarked grave. Yet, 
for political freedom and for moral worth, in the world of after 
times, how much has Geneva accomplished; and how much of the 
vast influence is traceable to this single, poor, suffering invalid. 

His religious influence went out over Switzerland, and over 
France, far and long as it was Huguenot; and over Britain, 
and over Holland, and over our own North America, far as 
Britain and Holland colonized its shores, and shaped its later 
institutions and history. When the Huguenots were expelled 
from France by the disastrous revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes, how widely, amid their poverty, their sorrows, and their 
desolation, did those illustrious exiles diffuse over the Nether- 
lands, and Protestant Germany, and Protestant England, and to 
our own land, yet British and Colonial, their blessed influence 
for freedom, for justice, for enlightenment, and for the virtues 
of the home and the mart and the legislative hall. Lady Rus- 
sell, the meek, fearless wife who sat at the side of her patriotic 
husband, Lord William Russell, taking notes, when he was to 
be sacrificed at the ruthless will of James IL, was the descend- 
ant of a French Huguenot nobleman, Rouvigny. The Coligny, 
and the Sully, and the Mornay of French history, how much 
did they radiate of the influence of Geneva. 

There is a glorious recoil of influence, in quarters alien or 
even hostile to the religious body exercising that influence, 
which must be remembered to know all of good that God 
garners around his people's hearth-stones and graves. When 
papal and royal fanaticism expelled the Huguenots from France 
the great Catholic preachers, Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaolue, 



JOHN CALViy. 225 

Flechier, and Massillon, who liad so illustrated France while the 
Uugiienot pastors and professors were on the same soil their 
competitors, passed away with the expulsion of those competi- 
tors; and the Catholic pulpit of France had no successors, in 
talent and power, equalling these coevals and rivals of the men 
of Saumur, Sedan, and Charenton. Catholic France eclipsed 
the light of her own pulpits when overturning the less gor- 
geous desks of the Protestant and the Calvinist. When the 
men of the Huguenot stock went out to the galleys, or to the 
scaffold, or to the fight of the Cevennes, or to the refuges in 
Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, Britain, and Colonial America, the 
voices of the dominant Church diminished in volume, and their 
moral influence dwindled also, rapidly and ingloriously, down. 

So the great Jansenist movement, that accomplished so 
much for morals, for literature, and for Christian piety, in the 
recluses of Port Royal, and in the men who with Qucsnel and 
others sought shelter in Protestant Netherlands, was largely 
traceable to a reflex action of the Calvinistic controversy and 
schools and churches of France. The St.-Cyran and the Jan- 
senius began their studies in consequence of and in strict con- 
temporaneousness with the great Synod of Dort, where the 
Calvinism of Holland met the antao-onistic doctrine of the 
Arminian. That Calvinism drove these young Catholics to 
the study of the works of Augustine. The one, Jansenius, pro- 
duced his great volume on the views of that Church father, 
after repeated perusals of his entire writings, and gave his 
own name to the system thus proclaimed. Through what bit- 
ter conflicts and agonies of life it moved. It had its Arnaulds, 
vexed with taunts against the Protestant blood of some of their 
ancestry, and the De Saci, and Pascal and his sister. What 



226 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

new life it breathed into Frencli literature, and what master- 
pieces, in his " Thoughts," and " Provincial Letters," Pascal left 
to the study of aftertimes, and the admiration even of an in- 
fidel Voltaire. Down from the days of their Duguet and 
Nicole to the times of Royer-Collard, in our own age, how 
much have the men, thus glorifying God's Scripture and God's 
grace, benefited their land and their age. For, as of old, it is 
true : those whom God honors are those who honor him. 

Upon our own first Puritan colonists of New England how 
strong was the impress of Calvinism on the Hookers and 
Shephards that emigrated hither, and on the Ames that in- 
tended to pass hither. So, in England, the Hampdens and the 
Cromwells, and the Pyms, traced to their cradles and homes 
and family altars, are found of the spiritual kith and kin of 
the men of the Leman Lake. In Revolutionary times the 
Rutledges, and the Laurenses, and the Jays, and the Ramsays, 
and the Pinckneys, we believe, were of Huguenot stock. 

God forbid that we forget the high services of the men and 
the Churches, who questioned or who withstood this great 
movement of religious feeling and opinion. From both sides 
will ultimately come the accordant testimony that of the 
divine grace — whether it were the Calvinist or the Arminian 
that on earth best expressed it — of the grace of God, free and 
sovereign, came all good ; and when, at the last day, angels 
lay the last coping on the completed and symmetric structure, 
forgotten all earthly controversy in the clear light of the 
beatific vision, and eclipsed all meaner lustres of doctors, con- 
fessors, and martyrs in the splendor of the manifested Redeem- 
er, shall rise, sweet, and unanimous, and unceasing, the shout, 
" Grace, grace unto it." 



JOHN KNOX. 227 



XL 

JOHN KNOX. 

" A PERFERViD race — the race of Scottish men " — is the 
judgment pronounced upon liis nation by one of their great 
scholars, George Buchanan. Perfervid, a Latin phrase for ex- 
cessive or boiling ardor. Nor is the epithet other than one of 
eulogy and of benediction, unless the trait which it describes 
be counterpoised by attendant defects of character which 
should hinder that seething energy from leading to usefulness ; 
as if, by the precipitancy that makes no adequate scrutiny, by 
the inconsideration that pronounces without knowledge, by the 
flippancy whose gushings bear no freight of thought, by the 
inconstancy that soon abandons what it has capriciously and 
suddenly begun, or by the inconsistency that has no singleness 
of aim and no steadfastness of purpose, and that blends its 
hosannas and its anathemas over one and the same banner 
with very rapid and. heedless alternations. The Apostle Paul, 
who, under God, has accomplished so much for the Church of 
God and for the entire Gentile world, has declared that " it is 
good to be zealously affected " in a good cause. The consum- 
ing energy and ebullient ardor, characteristic of the stock 
whence he sprung, lacked neither decision nor forecast nor 
perseverance, as its attendant influences, in the career of John 
Knox — the perfervid Reformer of a perfervid people. His soul, 
all aglow for the trut-h of God when he had once discerned it. 



228 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

proclaimed and defended the Gospel of Christ, thus discerned, 
with an engrossing and blazing earnestness that the blandish- 
ments of a court could not wilt, and which the hardships of 
the galley, where, with fettered ankles, he toiled at the heavy 
oars, nineteen months a prisoner, and the menaces of death, 
frequent, close, and malignant, as it dogged his track, could not 
make to quail. A price set on his head, burnt in effigy as a 
heretic, marked for assassination, solicited to yield by more 
timorous and pliable, but often noble and wealthy, associates in 
reform, he held on with a resolute integrity that could not be 
manipulated by the intriguers, or disheartened by the waverers 
of his own party, till his own people, before his death, learned 
to describe him as the one who, in planting Christ's Gospel in 
their nation and land, and in watering it when so planted, 
had surpassed all others of his countrymen and fellow-laborers. 
Rugged, impetuous, and uncontrollable where he deemed prin- 
ciple involved, he yet displayed naught of the overbearing in 
his temper to his associate confessors; nor are the traces of 
personal ambition or greed found in any part of his course ; 
and in the home, and in the intercourse with his fellow-preach- 
ers and confessors, he showed himself a man eminently loving 
and lovable. Where God's truth was to be asserted or avenofed 
he stood up, stern and immovable as the granite hills ; but in 
commending that truth to the sad, the lowly, and the kindly, 
his speech rippled, sparkled, and bounded and bubbled, like the 
brooks of his country finding their clear way in speed through 
the clefts of bare hill-sides, exultant and loud, on their way to 
the sea. 

Luther did his work in an old German empire splintered up 
among various principalities and electorates. Calvin's seat of 



JOHN KNOX. 229 

instruction was in a free city, with democratic institutions by 
the Leraan Lake. But Knox had his lot cast in a turbulent 
kingdom, with a powerful but discordant nobility ; its court 
torn by relations, now to the English monarchy and nation in 
the Southern portion of the island, and now to the kingdom of 
France, with which rOyal intermarriages had closely connected 
both its regal and noble houses. The minority of the heir to 
the Scottish throne in two several periods, and the Regencies 
wielding power during such minority, complicated the difficul- 
ties at home and abroad; while the great Reformer did his 
work and delivered his testimony. 

The land of Wallace and of Bruce presents itself often, to 
the fancy of a modern observer, only with the pastoral and the 
chivalrous environments with which the genius of her Burns 
and her "Walter Scott have surrounded her people and her 
scenery, in later and happier days. But, in the age upon 
which God's providence had cast the lot of John Knox, the 
country had much of wild anarchy, of moral degradation and 
gross ignorance, of irreligion, and of comparative barbarism in 
certain portions of its population. The race who had fought 
at Bannockburn and at Flodden Field w^ere a brave race, but 
the schools and the pulpits and the presses and the libraries of 
succeeding times wTre not as yet their possessions. A states- 
man and scholar like the Frenchman, Du Plessis Mornay, in a 
work that was sent out but a few years after Knox had sunk 
into the grave — Mornay's treatise on the "Truth of the Chris- 
tian Religion," issued in 1580 — speaks of the barbarians of our 
time, and presents those dwelling in Greenland and in the ex- 
treme parts — the outlying regions — of Ireland and Scotland 
as such, though his own country, France, and Scotland were 



230 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

so closely and often intertwined by political alliances ; and he 
could not, therefore, be utterly unconversant with the condi- 
tion, as to literature and religion, of a kingdom thus blending 
often in military and national action its interests with his own 
native France. Mornay's words, of course, intended mainly or 
exclusively but an allusion to the far northern regions, and the 
outlying islands of the Scottish territory, its far Hebrides swept 
by wintry winds and laved by restless seas. But it is signifi- 
cant how he clusters thus Esquimaux, and the contemporary 
clansman at the extreme north of what is now lettered and 
cultured Scotland. Coming down to a day much nearer our 
own, that of Fletcher of Saltoun, who died but in 1716, some 
one hundred and sixty years ago, we find that true patriot pro- 
posing, in forlorn despondency over a certain part of the poor 
of Scotland, to remedy and elevate their condition by selling 
them into a sort of slavery that would care for them. 

There are those who have dwelt with more of lamentation 
or even bitter denunciation, on the rugged zeal of the great 
Reformer of Scotland, than seems fitting or grateful. They 
would appear to forget that, in eras of strife and grinding col- 
lisions between great interests, secular and religious, brought 
into deadly antagonism, mere gentleness would be often sheer- 
est inefficiency. " Revolutions," say the French, " are not made 
with rose-water." A far higher authority, speaking of the garb 
and haunts and bearing of his own great forerunner, and of the 
wearers of soft apparel, in contrast with him, said that they 
were to be looked for " in kings' houses ;" but the eater of 
locusts and wild honey, and the wearer of rough camel's hair, 
gone out into the wilderness, was like the Elijah of a former 
age, whom he worthily reproduced — the fitting reformer of a 



JOHN KNOX. 231 

degenerate time and an apostate Church. His stern rudeness 
of bearing and of surroundings the better adapted hira to 
startle a land out of its perilous slumberings ; and if in rous- 
ing the conscience of a Herod he bred the murderous grudge 
of a Herodias, the results of the turmoil and the martyrdom 
did not disprove the divine mission of our Lord's forerunner. 
In the providence of God the century into which Knox was 
flung was a very maelstrom in the mad whirling of its various 
and furious elements. The stout diver who was successfully 
to traverse its currents needed a stout heart and a sinewy arm, 
if he were to re-appear presenting for his beloved country a re- 
covered Gospel. And the violences so much deprecated were 
earlier, and were fiercer, and were more enduring with the ene- 
mies of God's truth, than with its advocates and evangelists. 
When, in the early days of Knox's reforming career, four Scot- 
tish men were hung at Perth for eating goose on a Friday, and 
a young woman, with her sucking infant on her breast, was 
drowned because in the birth-peril she refused to invoke the 
Virgin Mary as her helper ;* when the good Wishart, the 
friend of Knox, scholarly, eloquent, and irreproachable, meek 
and kindly, was burnt by Cardinal Beatoun, after Knox, who 
had before, as disciple and guard, carried the sword in front of 
his excellent but threatened teacher, but had by that revered 
teacher been sent back to his own pupils and home, Wishart 
saying, in full prospect of the fate that awaited hira, " One 
is sufficient for a sacrifice ;"f when, in a later period of the 
struggle, Walter Milne, at the age of eighty-two, a converted 
priest who had become a preacher of the Gospel, was committed 

* McCrie, p. 25, note. f Ihid.^ p. 25. 



232 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

to the flames, expressing the hope that he should be the last 
to suffer death for that cause (1558);^ and this sacrifice was 
exacted by the Archbishop of St. Andrews (that martyr, his 
victim, a holy and blameless man in character), it seems scarce 
equiable measure, to reserve all the sympathy for the ancient 
and picturesque hierarchy that rejoiced in such hangings and 
drownings and burnings, and to deplore the harsh firmness 
that, against such odds and confronting such treatment, up- 
lifted its voice for the truth as Christ gave it. The contem- 
porary poetry of Scotland, by Sir David Lindsay, described 
the clerical orders, both the secular and the monastic, as sunk 
deeply in corruption ; and a national Church that slaughtered 
its opponents in the mood of Athaliah, the old truculent queen- 
mother in Israel, and some of whose clergy and monks wallow- 
ed, like Hophni and Phineas, the sons of Eli, in uttermost de- 
basement of morals, around the precincts of old sanctuaries, is 
scarcely to be regarded as the true legitimate successor of the 
old Culdees of lona, much less of the still elder fishermen 
Apostles of the Galilean lake. In what sentence of what epis- 
tle or of what gospel was it written that the mother, to whom, 
when she interfered overweeningly as to miracle-working in 
the feast of Cana of Galilee, her son exclaimed, *' Woman, 
what have I to do with thee?" has, since her ascension to 
Paradise, undergone such grave alteration of character, and 
received such vast expansion of rights, that the young mother 
and her little nursling who invoked not, in the hour of nature's 
anguish, that mother's special patronage and aid, should for 
the omission be drowned bodily in ingulfing waters ? 

* McCrie, p. 133. 



JOHN KNOX. 233 

Born in 1505, it ^vas not until he ^vas of the age of thirty- 
seven, in the year 1542, that Knox fully identified himself 
^vitll the cause of the Reformation. But scant thirty years 
followed of a life -term for him; yet in that brief space of 
thirty years how much did that dauntless, heroic, and prayer- 
ful man accomplish for his country and for his age, before, at 
the age of sixty -seven, in 1572, he sunk exhausted into death. 

It had become almost, under the bitter denunciations of the 
Romish authorities and the feeble defences of later Protestant 
historians, a foregone conclusion to regard the traits of Knox, 
in his reforming work, as those of violence and barbarian fierce- 
ness. But the thorough researches, close, patient, and unassail- 
able, of M'Crie — not connected with the Established Presbyte- 
rian Church of Scotland, but belonging to one of the smaller 
Dissenting communions — have presented, as the scholars of 
Scotland have since very generally and eagerly acknowledged, 
the character of the great Reformer in a most attractive aspect. 
Justice, after the interval of more than two centuries, was done 
to the position, movements, and influence of a man to whom 
Scotland owes so much which she can never adequately repay. 
The inventions of his papal opponents were, indeed, full of 
disparagement ; but his traits, as they re-appear, on full and 
honest examination, in his travels, his kinsmanships, his corre- 
spondence, his preaching, his political influence, are invested 
with an energy, a disinterestedness, a simplicity, a tenderness 
even, and an absorbing consecration to his ministry, that make 
him, while heroic and martyr -like, eminently a man of the 
masses. Put the work of Luther on the shoulders of the more 
courtly but timid and ease -seeking Erasmus, or even on the 
gentle but yielding Melancthon, and the world of European 



234 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

civilization miojlit have missed enliofbtenment and enfranchise- 
ment, and sunk wearily into a new languor and stupor that 
would have required the sorest judgments to arouse her, or an 
overwhelming ruin to mark her guilt, and to terminate the 
fearful entailment of her persistence in fraud and her impu- 
nity in wickedness. 

The character of Knox has been more severely judged be- 
cause to so many the contemporary image of Mary Queen of 
Scots — for some years his sovereign, and in some signal emer- 
gencies his antagonist — has bewitched their fancy, and cast a 
spell over their judgment as to the era and its responsibilities. 
In few of the great personages of modern history has the in- 
terest of after generations been so vividly awakened, and in 
few careers have the errors of human forecast as to the future 
been more remarkably illustrated. Left at the earliest stage 
of life an orphan by the death of her royal father, who, when 
the birth of a daughter was announced to him, exclaimed, in 
allusion to the accession of his Stuart line to the throne by a 
daughter, " With a lass it came to us, and with a lass it goes 
again from us," expecting manifestly that, in an infant and 
female heritor, the sceptre would be snatched from their lineage 
and pass to strangers : it was the purpose of her father's op- 
ponent, the bluff and arrogant Henry VIII. of England, to 
espouse the infant orphan girl to his own infant son, the only 
boy of his progeny, afterward Edward VL, then a child of 
some five years old ; and thus, as the young princess's dower, 
annex Scotland to his own English dominions. Had the little 
child passed to the court of Henry, and received such training, 
in its comparatively more wholesome atmosphere, as made Lady 
Jane Grey what she became, or as trained the daughters of Sir 



JOHN KNOX. 235 

John Cheke, learned, devout, and noble women, to become one 
of them the motbcr of Sir Francis Bacon, the illustrious Lord 
Yerulam, and others the ornaments and delight of other hon- 
ored homes — had she, Mary, become first his wife, survived as 
his widow her husband, Edward YL, how new an aspect had 
the annals of the next century worn for England and for Scot- 
land as well. But, early sent to France to be reared for her lot 
as the consort of the heir-expectant of the French throne, in 
the most dissolute as the most refined court of Europe, where 
Catharine de Medicis was the controlling spirit ; and the in- 
fluence as to truth, principle, secular polity, and religious belief 
was so thoroughly, though bewitchingly, evil ; there, early a 
bride and early a widow, but initiated in the craft of State 
and the delusion of Church, as Borgias might exemplify and 
as Machiavels might idealize both State and Church, liow nat- 
ural it was that, full of fascination and rich in the varnish of 
external accomplishment as she might be, the young bereaved 
princess should return to her native Scottish shores full of re- 
gret for the Paris she left, and of distrust and scorn for the 
rucfrcd Scotland she was to rule. The Guises, the maliofn 
geniuses of the French metropolis and realm, sworn and ruth- 
less enemies of the far nobler Colignys — the Guises, her prompt- 
ers, her models, and her oracles ; and the fearful massacre of 
St. Bartholomew, as it occurred, ere her own descent from the 
Scottish throne, but a natural specimen of the temper and pur- 
pose of that family compact, into which those Guises and she, 
JMary, and the reigning pontiff had entered for the extirpation 
of Protestant heresy. She bewailed with tears, on quitting it, 
the gayety of the land of her adoption, and her education, and 
her betrothal ; but how much of what she thus prized was the 



236 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

elegance and richness of a Homer's Calypso or of a Tasso's 
Armida, as compared witli the more sober but more blessed 
views of life and of duty, into which the Bible and Plato 
would have introduced her, had Ascham been her tutor, and 
she, under his care, the fellow-pupil of Lady Jane Grey ? She 
attempted first to fascinate, and this failing, then to entangle 
and to crush Knox ; but under the influence of Darnley first, 
and then of Bothwell, and then of her English kinswoman and 
jailer, Elizabeth, how did her career of brilliancy and light- 
heartedness darken down into dishonor and craft thwarted. 
Death, boldly confronted at the last, yet has left her name, 
while to many a theme of admiration and lament, to others and 
the vast mass of readers and thinkers but what Knox sternly 
denounced it as being, the name of a Jezebel, adulteress and 
murderess, her husband her victim, and her son, if not per- 
verted to Rome, to be, far as her will could effect it, disinherit- 
ed, and his crown and realm made by a mother's act to pass to 
strangers. Yet her beauty, signal and radiant, her high refine- 
ment, and her many graces of manner, have so preoccupied the 
judgment of many that she has awakened in successive gener- 
ations her defenders; and some have even wished to urge on 
the papacy, of which she was so firm an adherent, the office of 
giving her the honors of canonization. Far as the papal court 
may have ventured in the work of lifting strange candidates 
for saintship into the calendar, it has halted and demurred in 
this case ; and the process of beatification has not yet at least 
been inaugurated in behalf of Darnley's widow, and the para- 
mour of Bothwell, and the mother of the uncouth and awkward 
James I. of England, who came so near being exploded in the 
Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes. 



JOHN KNOX. 237 

Knox, born in 1505, ^vas educated in the University of Glas- 
gow, with Buchanan as his fellow-student ; taught for some 
time in the University or in noble families, and became a priest 
in the Roman Catholic Church. Study of the early Latin fa- 
thers, and especially of Augustine, made him disfavor the ex- 
isting scholastic philosophy and theology. The writings of 
tlie Continental Reformers had won some currency in his native 
land. The old movements, under Wycliffe and the Lollards, 
liad in early times reached certain portions of his country; 
but the traces and memorials of these seem scarcely to have 
affected him. Patrick Hamilton, a youth of noble rank, had 
visited "Wittenberg and become a disciple of Luther and 
Melancthon. On returning to his native Scotland, he, LLamil- 
ton, was decoyed into a conference, but for the purpose merely 
of arresting him, and he was l)urnt in 1528, when Knox was 
some twenty-three years of age. Hamilton, when thus made 
a victim, was but twenty -four. The stake of this heroic suf- 
ferer must liave lit up many a study of the more sober and 
devout men of Scotland. Multitudes became interested in the 
new views ; some fled to the Continent, others were martyred. 
Knox left St. Andrews, then under the controlling influence of 
Cardinal Beatoun, a determined enemy of reform. Sentence 
was passed against Knox as a heretic when escaped ; he was 
degraded from the priesthood, and, according to Beza, Beatoun 
employed assassins to waylay and kill him ; but the patronage 
of some noble families shielded him, and Knox found employ 
as a teacher of the sons in the languages and in the new views 
of religious truth. The severities and iniquity of Cardinal 
Beatoun provoked a conspiracy in which Knox seems to have 
had no personal share ; but in the result of which, as bringing 

11 



238 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

to a violent and sudden end a persecutor of God's truth and 
people, Knox saw no little cause of rejoicing. It was held by 
the religious of the day that Wishart, when burning by Bea- 
toun's order, had predicted the speedy and violent end of liis 
persecutor. Knox's zeal for the truth, and his talents in com- 
mending it, had awakened the attention of many of the re- 
ceivers of the Gospel. John Rough, preaching to a garrison 
the recovered Gospel, found his fellow-believers united in the 
opinion that Knox ought to be called into the same ministry. 
Unexpectedly to him, Rough, in the presence of the congrega- 
tion, and as in a charge received from them, concluded his dis- 
course by calling on Knox to receive his vocation into the min- 
istry of the Word, if he would avoid God's heavy displeasure. 
Turning to his hearers, he, Rough, asked if this were not so, 
and if they did not approve this vocation. They replied, 
" It was, and they did approve it." It shows that the view of 
Knox's character, by many held, as if he were all adamantine, 
is thoroughly groundless, and that sincerity and deep feeling 
lay beneath the uneven rind of his outer manner, when, on this 
sudden appeal, Knox burst into tears, left the assembly, and 
shut himself in the solitude of his own chamber. For many 
days sad and burdened, he finally acceded to it, as the call of 
God's flock and God's providence; and, in the many changes 
and perils of after years, he never regretted his decision to 
abide by the solemn indication thus given him of the service 
to which God had called him. His powers as logician and de- 
bater had been early evident. In his new post they became 
soon called for. Rough, his fellow - pastor, was not deeply 
learned. A Romish priest had assailed Rough as not giving 
to the Church the authority which it deserved ; that Church 



JOHN KNOX. 239 

Iiaving, by the condemnation of Lutlier and his heresies, shut 
up all farther controversy. Knox to this replied in challeng- 
ing- the assailant to a public debate on the Sunday, in -which 
lie would show that the Pope was the antichrist and the Man 
of Sin. AVith a text out of Daniel and his vision of the four 
empires, Knox, with the command of hearty and popular elo- 
quence in which he so early and eminently excelled, showed 
that the Pope met the scriptural tallies and marks of the anti- 
christ ; and that, of course, he and his pontifical Church could 
have no authority. The discussion produced a wide, resonant 
impression, and the hearers and influence of Knox rapidly in- 
creased. The Church grew by rapid renunciations of Roman- 
ism; and the simple Lord's Supper was set up instead of the 
old idolatrous Mass. 

But a French fleet came in ; the castle of St. Andrews was 
besieged, and after a brave but fruitless resistance was surren- 
dered. Hough had before the siege set in left for England. 
Knox was among the prisoners carried in the French fleet, 
and in the galleys kept a prisoner afloat on the coast of France. 
Mass Avas often said in the hearing of the Protestant captives. 
The history of Knox relates an incident that is generally sup- 
posed to describe his own personal story. The captives, loath 
to honor either ceremony or image, a flnely painted figure of 
the Virgin was brought to one of them, and he was urged to 
give it the kiss of adoration. He declared it an idol, and 
refused to touch it. The officer who bore the deity insisted 
he should, and thrust it toward the prisoner's lips. Watching 
his opportunity, the prisoner clutched the wooden image and 
flung it into the river Loire, on which their prison-ship was 
lying, with the exclamation, " Let our Lady save herself now ; 



240 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

she is light enough ; let her learn to swim I" A proselyte so 
intractable was happy in escaping with his life ; but his firm- 
ness exempted him from all farther importunities of the kind. 
If the Virgin swam, or if she sunk, she certainly did not enlist 
Knox, by the day's incidents, among her votaries. Confine- 
ment and severity shook Knox's health, and from a fever 
which ensued his life was by his fellow-voyagers despaired of. 
But his fortitude never left him. Brought to a part of the 
Scottish coast, he was asked by a fellow-prisoner, who afterward 
recited it, if he recognized the shore. " That steeple," said 
Knox, " is St. x\ndrews, where God first opened my mouth to 
glorify his name. Weak as I now seem, I shall live to glorify 
him again in that same place." Captive and sick, it seemed 
unlikely of accomplishment ; yet, years after, Sir James Bal- 
four, the fellow-prisoner to whom Knox spoke this, repeated 
it to many witnesses, as having been said to him, and having 
been long after accomplished. He obtained his liberty after 
nineteen months, in consequence of peace between France, 
Scotland, and England ; and, as it now appears, by the per- 
sonal infiuence of Edward VL, the English king, exerted in 
his behalf. 

Visiting England, Knox attracted notice and such favor that 
Edward VI. offered him the appointment of Bishop of Roch- 
ester, a see where, if ease and wealth Avere his object, they were 
more sure and near than in his native land. He declined it 
because of scruples as to the scriptural warrant for diocesan 
episcopac3\ But he v.'as appointed one of the King's chap- 
lains in ordinary ; and Latimer and John Bradford, men in 
some peculiar sense of his own type of piety and of mental en- 
dowment, seem to have been among his intimate and beloved 



JOHN KNOX. 241 

friends. It is the infelicity of some recent writers in the Eng- 
lish Establishment to decry, even passionately, the services and 
character of Edward VI. It augnrs ill for the growth of a 
just reverence toward the English Establishment, either in the 
minds of the Non-conformists of England or of the Protestant 
Christians of other lands, when this course of remark becomes 
prevalent in English ecclesiastics. Latimer, even in the judg- 
ment of Saunders, the bitter libeller of the Reformation, was a 
preacher and a wit of rare powers. As for John Bradford, the 
Christian literature of England has few nobler and purer char- 
acters; and the young monarch, whose removal left the gaping 
gulf into which Lady Jane Grey went down as a martyr, and 
out of which emerged the monstrous forms of Mary and her 
Gardiner and her Bonner as martyr-makers, little deserves from 
those who recall his piety and his services to purer religion the 
disparagement and scorn some Anglicans have ventured of late 
to lavish upon him. Knox is regarded as having had influence 
to remove from the Common Prayer-book, in the revision un- 
der Edward, some features involving adoration of the elements 
in the Lord's Supper. In Queen Mary's time a persecutor de- 
plored his (Knox's) influence in that regard, as the authority 
of what the persecutor called "a runaway Scotsman." Into 
honor with God and with man the illustrious John Knox has 
" run " very far " away " from, because very far ahead of, his 
impugner. Dr. Weston, prolocutor, under Queen Mary, in a dis- 
putation with good doughty Bishop Latimer. Knox was of- 
fered promotion to a City charge in London. He incurred the 
ill-will of the powerful Earl of Northumberland, afterward a 
recreant, going over to the Romish Church, but seems to have 
conciliated the especial regard of the devout sovereign, lost too 



242 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

soon to liis subjects and to Protestant Europe. And Knox, a 
man of very keen, searching eye as to character, has left his 
testimony as to the rare and unmatched merits, for his years, 
of the prince early lost and deeply lamented. On his death 
Knox left London, but preached in other parts of England, fol- 
lowed by large congregations. Mary's policy of persecution, 
awhile veiled, was soon disclosed; and Knox left England for 
France. He repaired to Geneva, and formed the acquaintance 
and won the friendship of Calvin, with whom he long corre- 
sponded. Other Protestants fleeing from England were scat- 
tered over the Continent. To a colony of these at Frankfort 
he was asked to minister. Other refugees from England were 
opposed to his views, as not sufficiently favorable to the Epis- 
copal model, and insisted on introducing the English Prayer- 
book ; and as Knox had denounced the approaching marriage 
of Mary of England with Philip 11. of Spain, these opponents 
strove to stir up in Frankfort the magistrates against Knox. 
He left for the sake of peace, but it was to minister to a simi- 
lar group of English refugees at Geneva, w'here he was warmly 
welcomed by Calvin. A Queen-regent, as she was called, ruled 
now in Scotland, who, though Romanist, was somewhat in pol- 
icy alienated from the papist Queen Mary of England, her 
neio'hborino; sovereio-n, and e'ave the Protestants of Scotland 
more opportunity of meeting than they had before enjoyed. 
To hearten and edify them Knox again visited Scotland, en- 
couraged them, and then, on the appearance of new troubles, 
returned to labor for two years more with his English-speaking 
flock in Geneva. There he had some share in the English Ge- 
neva Bible, which continued long the favorite of many English 
Puritans, even after the received version was prepared. 



JOH^ KNOX. 243 

This year he issued, with his usual boldness and impetuosity, 
a work against female government generally, " A Blast of the 
Trumpet against tlie Monstrous Regiment of Women," occa- 
sioned by the terrible and sanguinary results of the sway of 
Queen Mary in England, then at its height. The Salic law had 
been lono^ that of the French monarchy, forbiddino; the acces- 
sion of women to the crown. Knox would make it a universal 
rule. When Mary died, her sister, Elizabeth, who succeeded 
her, but with far other relations to Protestants than her prede- 
cessor, was inclined to regard this volume of the Scottish teach- 
er as a grave and unpardonable offence. On the death of Mary 
of England the refugees from that country on the Continent 
flocked homeward from Geneva, as from other continental cities. 
The Scottish Qneen-regent was understood to promise some 
toleration and possible reformation in the Church of Scotland, 
but soon threw ofE the mask and avowed her sympathy with 
the Guises of France, in the scheme for the final and universal 
suppression of the Reformation throughout Europe. Knox 
landed in Scotland. Some favorers of reform dissuaded his 
appearing ; but he replied that none need be solicitous on his 
account. He craved not defence from any man, but only audi- 
ence ; if not there, he would find it elsewhere. lie appeared 
in the pulpit of St. Andrews, his theme the ejection by Christ 
of the money-changers, and for three days he continued his 
preaching. The magistrates and people set up the Reformed 
worship, pulled down monasteries and images and pictures. 
The billow of the movement went through the other cities of 
Scotland, and the monastic edifices went down before it. The 
saying, " Down with the rookeries, and the rooks will not re- 
turn," is attributed to Knox at this era. The philosophy was 



244 ERAS AXD CHARACTEBS OF HISTORY. 

sound. How far those who plead the Old Testament polity as 
a basis for the organism of the Christian Church are entitled 
to overlook the Old Testament denunciations of all idol wor- 
ship, and the patterns of a Josiah and a Hezeldah in the forci- 
ble and litter destruction of the image, the fane, and the grove, 
does not seem very apparent. The Protestants of Edinburgh, 
the chief city, chose Knox as their minister. He went, accord- 
ing to his own image, through the land as the priests of old 
about Jericho, blowing with trumpets as God gave strength. 
There was force in the image used by Sadlier, the English am- 
bassador, years after, when he said of the Eeformer's influence 
that one man, this same Knox, in one hour could infuse more 
life into the minds of the people than six hundred trumpets 
blaring in their ears.* And as to the potency of spiritual al- 
lies — unseen but supreme, on the one side, and of secular forces, 
visible and numerous but insufiBcient, on the other side — it is 
an illustration of Knox's faith that he said that he dreaded, as 
bringing down the divine displeasure, the celebration of one 
mass more than the introduction on the enemy's side of ten 
thousand armed men. It has been a profane saying of Na- 
poleon's, often recited as if unquestionable for pith and ver- 
ity in our times, that God was always, in the affairs of the 
nations, on the side of the heaviest battalions. If the Bi- 
ble be true — and the story of the nations has often repeated 
its loud echo to that record, as of verity all trustworthy — the 
battle is really the Lord's, and he gives it often to the few, 
the feeble, and the overthrown ; ay, as man intends it and in- 
terprets it, to the extirpated. AVhen the morning of the Res- 

* McCrie, p. 203. 



JOHN KXOX. 245 

urrection broke, it was not Csesar, or Pilate, or Ilerod, or Caia- 
plias that had the victory. It remained with the Spiritual and 
the Supernal, the Invisible, but the Omnipotent and the Omni- 
present; the Christ of the vacated tomb was the heir to all 
the camps and the palaces and the treasuries and the libraries 
of all the emperors. And he came, blessed be his name, to 
stay. Truth is indestructible. And the men enlisted simply 
and heartily in the cause of that leader, " the Truth and the 
Life," will outwear the Napoleons and outwatch the Machia- 
vels; for He whom they serve is in one mind, and none can 
turn him ; and the Father has covenanted, and under your eyes 
and mine is compassing tlie performance of that covenant, that 
his Son, the disowned, and rejected, and defenceless sufferer 
of Calvary, shall have the heathen for his inheritance and the 
uttermost parts of the earth for his possession. 

The congregation of the Protestants of Scotland moved for- 
ward. The Regent Queen was defeated, and soon died. The 
French allies her reliance withdrew, and a free Parliament was 
called. A Confession of Faith was adopted, and Scotland was 
Protestant. 

Queen Mary of Scotland, now a widow, was preparing to re- 
turn to Scotland, firm in the purpose to use her influence, far 
as it should be safe, in restoring the Romish faith. As she 
afterward wrote to the Council of Trent, this was her fixed pur- 
pose. She sent for Knox, and had earnest conferences, at first 
calm and flattering even. A massacre at Yassy, in France, of 
the Protestants excited, on the report of it, great agitation in 
the Protestant nations; but Mary gave a splendid ball, with 
dancing prolonged to a late hour, as in very ill-timed connec- 
tion with the savage story. Knox's discourse on the follow- 

11^ 



246 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

ing Sabbath was understood to comment sbarply on the vices 
and pleasures of princes. She cited him to her council-cham- 
ber, but his replies were gravely firm. Her popish attendants, 
on seeing him quiet after the interview, exclaimed that he was 
not afraid. "Why should the fair face of a gentlewoman af- 
fright me ?" cried he. " I have looked many angry men in the 
face, and have not been extravagantly alarmed." 

Her marriage with Darnley, a feeble youth and a Catholic, 
was soon mooted. Knox opposed it. He was summoned to 
meet the Queen. She vowed to be avenged of him, and burst 
into a flood of tears. Knox protested his distress when, called 
to chastise his own sons, he saw them weep ; far less could he 
rejoice in her Majesty's tears, but the sorrow he must bear, 
rather than betray his own conscience and the commonwealth 
by a guilty silence. Not long after she had him cited for a 
letter on public affairs. She had him summoned to answer 
on a charge of treason before the Privy Council. Friends ad- 
vised submission and retractation, but Knox was not to be daunt- 
ed, and her own Privy Council found his defence unassailable. 

The alienation between the ill-mated royal pair was followed 
by the murder of Rizzio. Knox had no share in it, but regard- 
ed it as God's just judgment. When Darnley was murdered, 
and Bothwell, the alleged murderer, became the Queen's hus- 
band, with unseemly haste and most clumsy arrangements, the 
indignation of the kingdom and of Europe was stirred. Knox, 
absent at the time of the union with Bothwell from Edinburgh, 
was worthily and bravely supplemented by his colleague in the 
pastorate, Craig, who, while publishing the banns, denounced 
the union. The flight of Bothwell, the surrender and impris- 
onment of Mary, her resignation of the government, and her 



JOUX KNOX. 247 

ultimate escape to England, where Elizabeth refused a personal 
conference, and instituted an imprisonment that led to plot- 
tings, treasonable against the Queen of England, however natu- 
ral to the imprisoned Queen of Scotland, were rapid descents 
along the downward course of the beautiful and accomplished, 
but it is to be feared guilty. Queen of Scotland. Knox had no 
hesitation in pronouncing her guilty of the double crime of 
adultery and murder, and held death the penalty to each, and 
much more to the coalescence of both crimes, enhancing and 
envenoming the one the other. The virtuous Earl of Murray, 
Regent, was assassinated by a retainer of the Hamilton family, 
whose life he had spared when convicted and sentenced to die. 
Reminded on his death-bed of his act of gentleness to his 
murderer, the earl replied naught should make him repent of 
an act of clemency. Care and labor, and feelings deeply tried, 
brought upon Knox an attack of apoplexy. But he soon 
resumed preaching. When he could speak but once, and 
mount to the pulpit only supported on either side, he is de- 
scribed, though on first entering the pulpit so feeble as to lean 
against it, soon so animated with his theme and message, as a 
young scholar, his hearer, describes it, he appeared soon ready 
to dash the pulpit, narrow and high, in which he stood into 
fragments as he spoke. News came of the terrible St. Bar- 
tholomew's massacre in Paris. The French ambassador to 
Scotland was present at Knox's appearance in the pulpit. 
Gathering the remains of his strength, Knox denounced the 
venojeance of Heaven ao-ainst that murderer and traitor, the 
King of France, Charles IX., and bade the ambassador tell his 
master, that divine vengeance would never quit him or his 
house without his repentance. The ambassador complained 



248 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY, 

of the indignity, and would have the Regent of Scotland 
silence such a preacher. But this was refused, and the embassy 
quitted the kingdom. On his death-bed Knox asked his wife 
to read the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the magnificent 
description of the Resurrection, and blessed God for the consola- 
tion which that chapter had given him. lie asked afterward 
his wife to read, as he phrased it, the part of Scripture " where 
he first cast anchor" or began to cherish strong hopes of per- 
sonal salvation. It was the seventeenth chapter of John's 
Gospel. Telling his three fingers, he said, " Now I commend 
my soul, spirit, and body into thy hands, Lord." His last 
sigh was accompanied with the w'ords, "Now it is come." 
AVhen they buried him, the Regent of Scotland, the Earl of 
Morton, uttered over him the w^ords so often cited : " There 
lies he who never feared the face of man." 

He was a great writer, in the sense of energetic and fearless 
appeal, an able reasoner, and most of all a fervent and un- 
daunted and spiritual preacher. Souls in multitudes looked 
to him as to their spiritual guide and their father in Christ. 
He seems to have had the warm love of his friends and near 
associates. But when duty required it he could break from 
associates loved and revered, and incur their coldness, if thus 
only the interests of the nation or of the Church were to be 
guarded. 

Scotland, in her after history, has been his best vindication 
and his most abiding monument. The schools which have 
so diffused education throughout her people were his work 
originally, though his more scholarly successor, Andrew Mel- 
ville, more highly developed them. 

It has been, amid thrift and integrity and diligence and 



JOHN KNOX. 249 

enterprise, the glory of the Scottish people to have made their 
influences, moral, spiritual, and mercantile and martial, more 
and more prized, and more indispensable to their English fel- 
low-subjects. It has been the weakness of the pure English or 
Anglo-Saxon stock to lavish scorn, often brutally, on the Taffy, 
the Sawney, and the Paddy of their Celtic fellow-subjects, as 
they clumsily travestied the names of the patron saints — St. 
David, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick — of these associated peoples, 
sharers of their destinies, their burdens, and their battle-fields. 
The people thus taunted have not reciprocated in like temper 
on St. George and his Dragon, as the Geordies. But the land 
which has been illustrated by the genius of Adam Smith and 
Reid and Sir William Hamilton, of Burns and Sir AValter Scott, 
and Campbell and John Wilson, has done yet more for the 
interests of the empire, in the influence of the Covenanters and 
the revivals of Cambuslang, in the ministry of the Alexander 
Henderson, and the Alexander Peden, and the Thomas Chal- 
mers, and the Thomas Guthrie. Scottish soldiers have fought 
her battles from Sir Ralph Abcrcrombie and Sir John Moore 
down to Sir Colin Campbell. 

Her scholars and her lawyers, like the Erskines and the 
Jeffreys and the Kaimes, have been no ineffective or indolent 
contributors to the influence and glory of the land. 

But there arise, from time to time, those who affect to de- 
plore and to denounce the strong indignation of John Knox. 
His own times, when he was more nearly and more thorouglily 
known, held him a man of God, and that his sayings were 
often found prophetic as against individuals untrue to duty 
and to the cause of truth. Even men enemies to his creed 
yet quailed before what seemed the evidence that God was 



250 ERAS AND CHAEACTERS OF HISTORY. 

near this true man of God. For one so nearly yet reverently 
communing with the Most High, and so conversant with holy 
Scripture, might well read character more aptly than his or- 
dinary neighbors, and there is a sense in which " the secret 
of the Lord is with them that fear him." So Englishmen held 
it of the good Archbishop TJssher, and devout Covenanters of 
the good Alexander Peden. 

Those who think, with some of our times, that all high ear- 
nestness and sharpness in religious controversy are out of 
keeping with courtesy have lost sight of the old prophets and 
apostles. Cobbett was fond of admiring the sharp epithets of 
Swift, and aptly emulated them. Had he the naming of some 
schemes of reform, he would describe them as hoping to recast 
the world under the auspices of Smirk and Slobber. A court- 
ly smile was on the one side to invite all adhesions to what 
was commended, and the rheum of a profuse scorn was to 
flood away all that was to be rejected. There are men who, 
strong in the vaunted progress of the nineteenth century, ex- 
pect to banish conscience and Scripture and the old creeds by 
the deluge of their glib disparagement. Such reformers would 
expect, in the sweep of the flood that streams from their sov- 
ereign lips, to obliterate landmarks solid as the old Pyramids 
of Egypt. The oldest foundations of a divine authority are 
to be subverted and overthrown, when these lofty speculators 
void upon the ancient monuments their rapid and their vapid 
denunciation. The process has been tried before, in the days 
of the old Alexandrian eclecticism, in the times of scepticism 
that attended the Classic Revival, in the nascent days of Ger- 
man Rationalism, as before in the heyday of French material- 
ism and atheism. But the floods went by, and the "Word of 



JOnX KNOX. 251 

God remained; for it could not be floated off by the mere 
word of man. And he who, like John Knox, fearing not man's 
face, finds in the fear of the Lord the beginning of his wisdom, 
and in the cross of Christ the foundation of his hopes, and in 
the judgment-bar of Christ his last audit and his sure record, 
is not to be railed out of court by the men whose sovereign 
Avisdom is an amplification of Self. The world's ills are not 
conjured away by such spells, and the world's true reformers 
are invincible to such impeachers and mockers. 

The Scotland of the nineteenth century is the attestation 
that Knox was a God-sent and a God-owned man. Let his as- 
sailants match and surpass his work. 



252 EliAS AND CHAHACTERS OF mSTOHY. 



XII. 

THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 

There is a drift in our age toward materialism wliicli leads 
men unconsciously to exaggerate and overvalue advantages 
that are merely material and tangible, as if these last only had 
reality, and all else were but visionary and worthless. But, in 
truth, spiritual conquests may be of far higher moment to the 
happiness of the individual and the nation than any gains and 
inventions that are but of the earth earthy. Italy could far 
better afford to lose the magnificent Cathedral of Milan, with 
all its splendor and majesty and artistic wealth, than that it 
should have missed the glory and the impulse lent its litera- 
ture by the great epic of Dante, the " Divina Commedia." Bet- 
ter for the race to be without the buildino: than without the 
book. And the old pagan Classical Italy, of yet earlier cen- 
turies, would have been less impoverished by some earthquake 
that should have ingulfed bodily Rome's massive Coliseum, 
than had the storms of Northern invasion and Gothic barba- 
rism swept out of existence and memory all manuscripts of the 
orations and philosophical treatises of Cicero, and of the poetry 
of her Virgil, her Horace, and her Juvenal. The man, formed 
in the image of God, was not meant to "live," and finds him- 
self by bitter experiment unable to live, " on bread alone." 
Gains and luxuries that may be told upon the fingers or but- 
toned securely into the pockets, commodities of the larder and 



THE rUFdTAN AND THE 31YSTIC. 253 

the buttery-liatch and the %vine-cellar and the exchequer, will 
not meet the cravings of the heart, when fully awake, or calm 
the troubled and foreboding soul. Steam-engines, and rail- 
roads, and spinning- jennies, and submarine telegraphs — all 
mighty and gold-breeding in their way — yet, in their consum- 
mate and conglomerated successes, are something lower and 
poorer than are freedom and conscience and moral character 
and eternal destiny. 

An Alfred did more for the English people than an Ark- 
wright with his looms, or a Jenner with his vaccination. The 
inventor of the stocking-loom did w^ell for his nation and his 
times ; but the barons who extorted Magna Charta centuries 
before had done far better for their own island and for the 
race. And though a pontiff banned the sturdy barons for their 
work, the papal curse did not hold, and the national charter did 
hold; and every free people now on the face of our planet is 
at this time the richer for the influence of their act — an influ- 
ence, be it remembered, spiritual, and not material. Great 
national upheavals have owed their success, not to the battles 
so much, that came in their front or in their train, and to the 
material expenditure of treasure and of blood which they re- 
quired, as to the spiritual truths that moved behind them. 
Crusades, and Spanish Armadas, and French Bartholomew mas- 
sacres have, spite of the pontiff's benediction, failed, because 
the truth of Christ's Gospel, an unseen but most potent ele- 
ment, was not w^ith the blare of their trumpets, the flutter of 
their banners, and the keen edfje of their swords. 

The Lollard preachers of Wycliffe, plainly clad and bare- 
footed, went down before persecution, but not their spiritual 
testimony. The Testaments of Tyndale went by hundreds to 



254 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

the fire, as did their meek, brave translator. But no Sunday- 
school child, in outlying log-hut mission, in any land where the 
English tongue is spoken, is there but is this day the better for 
the work of those harried and incarcerated and execrated and 
incinerated witnesses for Christ and for his Gospel. Paper 
and ink from preachers and from Reformer were burnt, but 
their message was vitrified by those fires into the national 
heart and character. The stool on which Jenny Geddes sat, 
her sole substitute for pew-back and pew-cushion, when she 
hurled it indignantly at the official reciting a prelatical service 
in her old sanctuary, was a material weapon and of homeliest 
and clumsiest aspect. But behind it, back of that awkward 
missile, was the conscience of a nation whom Knox had evan- 
gelized, and who grew indignant at the invasion on ancestral 
liberties and ancestral worship. And that invisible spiritual 
power moved onward, through these and the like crude engine- 
ry, to the ultimate overthrow of the Stuart dynasty, the relig- 
ious independence of Scotland, and the political freedom of the 
British people. Even David Hume, not an illiterate or incom- 
petent witness, and one biassed with no religious partialities in 
their favor, accords to the Puritans the origin of the political 
liberties of England. With what heroic steadfastness did they 
move toward that end, and to a higher end — the moral renova- 
tion of England — past dungeons, scaffolds, and battle-fields. 
There are those who rejoice in the freedom and vaunt its worth, 
but who speak flippantly of its winners. Gray, in his great 
"Elegy in a Country Church -yard," intimates but too dis- 
tinctly that one of these Puritan leaders was complicated in 
the responsibility for the slaughters which resistance to the 
tyranny of Laud, Strafford, and their royal master, the first 



TUE rURITAX AND THE- MY STIC. 255 

Charles, involved — was not "guiltless of his country's blood." 
Surely the guilt of martyr-blood and patriot-blood, munificently 
poured forth in defence of man's best rights and of God's holi- 
est truths, comes to the door of the mitred and crowned op- 
pressors whose aggressions extorted the sacrifice, and not on 
the heads of the heroic victims who counted not their own 
lives dear when the great spiritual boons, freedom in religion 
and conscience, were at stake. 

^Yho the Puritans were and what they did we may well ask, 
for the inquiry leads us back to deeds of stirring pith, and the 
name, once given in scorn as a term of darkest obloquy, has 
now put on dignity and renown. As used through the whole 
period of the reign of the Stuarts in England, from the days of 
Ben Jonson to those of Butler, the author of " Hudibras," it 
was given scofBngly to men who were regarded as assuming a 
special pureness and sanctity of character, which was felt to 
cast reproach on the Sunday revellings of the rural green and 
of the royal court, on the mask and the mixed dance, and the 
deep potation and the glib cursing of what called itself the 
gallant knighthood, and the cheery carousing of Merry Eng- 
land. Households like those of Baxter's father and of Philip 
Henry, father of the Scripture commentator, were hardly beset 
in the endeavor to keep quiet Sabbath at their own homes. 
Prelates, officious and eager, hunted out the preachers of this 
obnoxious class ; and fine, prison, and exile often were the 
visitation of what were by a very grim irony called the Spirit- 
ual Courts, upon those who would not as preachers read from 
their pulpits the King's license, that Sunday afternoon should 
be given to bear-baiting, dog-fighting, revelling, and dancing, 
and tippling. It was like the name given, in a later day, of 



25G ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

Methodists to the young students who lived after a method or 
constant rule in their reading and praying ; and the scoff, meek- 
ly accepted, became the designation of the body which, under 
the Wesleys and Whitefield, and Hervey, and Howell Harris, 
did so much to evangelize England and Wales. 

In later days it was replaced by the title of " The Saints," 
or " The Godly," applied with bitter hate to Wilberforce and 
his friends in the movement to infuse new life into the torpor 
of the Establishment, and to set free the multitudinous cap- 
tives who had been reft by Christian Britain from pagan Af- 
rica. Through what storms of derision did Wilberforce move 
to his end. George HI. and his whole household were against 
the early movements. Consult the light literature of the day 
to know the rancorous invective and the gay contempt that 
by turns assailed the meek champion. But he persists till, as 
Daniel O'Connell said, in one of his best flights, he (Wilber- 
force) went up to heaven, bearing in his hand the rent mana- 
cles of myriads on myriads of enfranchised bondmen. 

The planters of our own New England were largely of Pu- 
ritan faith and Puritan blood. It was the bitter jibe of a 
school-boy in one of the great English public schools, many 
years since, that the Adam and Eve of these North American 
Colonies of Britain came out of Newgate. He was confound- 
ing the Botany Bay colonists of Britain's Australian posses- 
sions in his own times, with the heroic and scholarly and mar- 
tyr-like men, contemporaries and school-mates and correspond- 
ents of the younger Vane, the Cokes, the Pyms, the Eliots, 
the Baxters, the Hampdens, and the Cromwells, and the Sel- 
dens, and the Owens, whom no college, British or Continental, 
might not be proud to own, and who, in statesmanship, and 



THE PURITAN AXD THE MYSTIC. 257 

valor, and moral worth — and some of tliem in ancient descent 
— were the peers of Europe's oldest nobility and tLe conquer- 
ors of Britain's doughtiest chivalry. The Ilookers, the Nor- 
tons, and the Sheppards, and the Mathers of our own early his- 
tory were no weaklings in the study or in the pulpit ; nor was 
Roger Williams such — the guest of Yane, and the visitor of 
John Milton, and the champion for two continents of religious 
freedom, when the Westminster Assembly men, and the Pres- 
byterians of Scotland, and the Episcopalians of England all 
banded together to denounce his hardihood. 

Intended to denounce as preciseness and as affectation, or 
as sheerest hypocrisy, the exactness of those who believed that 
Christianity was a practical religion — demanding holiness in 
those who were recipients of Christian ordinances, and from 
the attendants on Christian sanctuaries — it took in, in their 
distinctive peculiarities, though not in its first coinage, the 
Presbyterians of Scotland no less than the men within or out 
of the Episcopal Establishment in England, who laid stress on 
Christian character, as the indispensable accompaniment and 
the natural exegesis for the people's eye, of Church creeds and 
of Church rituals. The Covenanter, hunted down by Claver- 
house and his dragoons, or hung in the Tolbooth, because he 
demanded freedom to hear his Bible expounded by teachers 
whom he revered in modes to which he and his fathers were 
devoted, was, with his co-religionists, in doctrines and general 
bearing akin to the Puritans of England and the North Ameri- 
can colonists who sailed from England to plant our eastern coast. 

The body were not destitute of scholarship. In their views 
of the great Calvinistic system of doctrine, and in their views 
as to what constituted the religious experience of the true be- 



258 IJBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

liever, tliey Lad on their side scholars like the great Archbish- 
op Ussher of the Irish Episcopal Establishment, a worthy com- 
peer of Selden. They had had, when our received version of 
the Bible was first suggested, among them John Reynolds, one 
of the finest theologians and scholars of England, in many 
walks the equal, and in others the superior, of Bishop An- 
drewes, one of the most learned of the adherents to the 
Church polity and party. Alexander Henderson, and Samuel 
Rutherford, and David Dickson, and David Calderwood, and 
George Gillespie of the Scottish Presbyterians were eminently 
devout, and were men, too, of scholarship. 

The name given to similar trains of like believers had, in the 
days of mediaeval persecution, been reproduced by a kindred 
epithet from the Greek, of the same general sense, " the Ca- 
thari," men seeking to cleanse themselves from the clinging de- 
filement of the Apocalyptic Babylon — men who, because their 
Saviour was holy, heeded his charge as he charged them to be 
themselves also holy. And back of these " Cathari," standard- 
bearers of primitive truth and primitive holiness, in the dark 
days of general torpor and spiritual apostasy, the name was 
found as applied to a class in the very Scriptures of our com- 
mon faith. Not with a special reference to certain exclusive 
and peculiar devotees, as the Papal Church has applied the 
term, the epistles of the New Testament, the work of the 
Apostles under plenary inspiration, had designated the entire 
body of Church adherents as " Saints," called to be such by the 
vows of their first confession, and if truly received into the fel- 
lowship, sealed as such by the graces and energies of the Holy 
Ghost. The Saint is but the Puritan by anticipation ; and the 
God of the Bible gave the designation. 



THE PURITAN AND THE 31 Y STIC. 259 

Take the term, then, in its historical affinities and it shows 
the Puritan and the Covenanter, the successors of the mediaeval 
Cathari, and of the primeval Christians; men who, at the bid- 
ding of a Divine Master, avouched his sacred will as their rule 
of life, and his blessed example in his human incarnation as 
the model to be evermore studied and reproduced in the entire 
body of the faithful. Truth, as accepted by the enlightened 
conscience and the regenerate heart, w-as a moral transfigura- 
tion ; and holiness became its necessary and inevitable efflux, 
radiated forth upon the darkness of the world and against the 
mocking enmity of that great enemy who rules in the hearts 
of the children of disobedience. And it w-as a singular instance 
of the ready and instinctive retention by the old antagonist 
forces of evil and paganism and heresy — all riot and all infi- 
delity — as flinging the watchwords of the old strife against the 
contemporary defenders of the old Gospel, that in the Christian 
Britain of our nineteenth century the pristine form of the epi- 
thet was used half scoffingly and half admiringly against the 
like-minded followers of the Christian Captain Havelock in the 
wars of India. Some service w^as needed that, to be effectual, 
required sober heads and prompt movements. " Call out," said 
the officer above him, " Havelock and his Saints — for they are 
always ready, and they are never drunk." Ay, the apt and pat 
word, and yet how old — " Saints " — such in the page of Paul — 
such in the " Cathari," that in the wilderness testified ao-ainst, 
and bled before, the apostate mother of harlots — such in the 
Covenanters and Cameronians of Scotland and Northern Ire- 
land — such in the Non-conformists and Methodists of later 
days. Not like them of Roman calendars, haunters of cells 
and hermitages, and dwelling with Simon Stylitcs on the pillar- 



260 EM AS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. " 

top, catching' all hearts and eyes by the spectacle of voluntary 
self-torture, but saints of daily life, in the mart, the booth, the 
camp ; with Bunyan at the tinker's task, or in the twelve-3^ears 
dungeon ; with Keach in the pillory ; with Baxter, aged but 
calm, under the insults of Jeffreys; or with Owen and John 
Janeway, or Renwick, or Guthrie, in quiet study or under grim 
gallows-tree, everywhere and every v/ay cultivating holiness in 
the fear of God, and by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Ex- 
iled, emigrant, prisoned, pilloried, impoverished, derided, pro- 
scribed, and hunted ; and yet, amid all this variety of treatment 
and condition, endeavoring as in the sight of God to be and 
remain unblemished before the world that maligned them, and 
eying resolutely and cheerily the death-day and the judgment 
bar to which that scoffino; world was in all hot haste hurlino* 
them. 

Puritanism, in its just and wide application, takes in those 
of similar faith and the like godliness in Huguenot France, 
and in Protestant Holland and Switzerland and Germany. 
The word " Pure," that Englishmen devised to affix upon them, 
came, as scholars say, through Sanscrit and Greek origins, from 
the idea of a purity, or cleanness, ascertained and refined as by 
fire ; and God's Spirit long since spoke of graces " tried as by 
fire " — a fine gold of consistent and devout persistency, that 
did not shrink from the mounting flame and the glowing cru- 
cible. Whoever coined the epithet, and with whatever intent 
of disparagement and derision, it is a banner under which 
apostles did not shrink from marching. It was a sternness of 
Christian principle and a thoroughness of Christian loyalty 
that accepted obedience to God at all risks, as before man, as 
the only course of true wisdom and genuine freedom and in- 



THE PURITAN ASD THE MYSTIC. 261 

natc manhood. AYilliam of Orange, the enfranchiscr of the 
Netherlands ; Coligny of France, the brave admiral, victim of 
St. Bartholomew ; the Latimers and the Hoopers of England 
— how glorious are the names that glisten on the muster-roll 
of this great troop! "Tried by fire, they shine as the fine 
gold." 

From the origin and bearing of the name let us pass to 
some brief glance at their deeds. Look at what they did for 
England. Our existing received version was suggested, at the 
Hampton Conference, by Dr. John Reynolds, a most devout 
man, and one of the most learned scholars in a very learned 
age ; Ussher, Andrewes, Selden, Gataker, and Lively, and Hugh 
Broughton among his contemporaries; and he was the peer 
of any one of them, the superior in erudition of the most of 
them. He did not live to see the completion of the new re- 
vision ; but it was the request of his party and himself, and 
while life was indulged him his last days were spent in con- 
tributing to the work. Though in many respects by his tastes 
severed from them, in general opinions and in political action 
Selden was with them. The share of him and his more Puri- 
tan associates, Pym and Hampden, in bringing about, by the 
great Bill of Rights and kindred measures, a dike that effect- 
ually shut out the ingushing flood of despotism that Charles 
L, under his French and Romanist councillors, would have 
brought upon British freedom, is a history of which British 
annalists cannot well tire. 

It was Puritanism that, in Cromwell and in Ireton and Har- 
rison, on the land, won victories before which the chivalry and 
Cavaliers could not stand. It was Puritanism that in Blake 
fought so resplendently on the seas, and made France, Spain, 

12 



262 ERAS AND CHARACTERIS OF HISTORY. 

and Italy, with all their Catholicism, quail before the valor of 
English sailors, many of them, with their captains, eminently 
God-fearing men. It was Puritanism that, under the Admiral 
Lawson, the Baptist Puritan, won the victories that inured to 
the credit of James, Duke of York, afterward as a king James 
11. , both on land and on sea showing for himself so little of 
valor or conduct, and so much of cowardice. 

It was Puritanism that gave, through Milton, its greatest 
epic to English literature. It was Puritanism that, through 
Bunyan, dreaming and tagging laces for his children's bread 
in Bedford Jail for twelve years, gave England its greatest al- 
legory, yet unmatched and unapproachable — the " Pilgrim's 
Progress." And England paid the poet with mocking, and 
taunts, and neglect, and poverty. And England paid the alle- 
gorist with taking one-fifth of his life for the dungeon-walls, 
and with telling him of her mercy in not having hanged him 
as a recusant when neglecting attendance on his parish church 
— him who was meanwhile preaching and writing for more of 
a multitudinous mass of readers, his virtual parish, than the 
best of their bishops ever reached, or is ever likely to reach, 
Puritanism went on when the Stuarts returned from exile. 
There was a recoil from severity to extremest license; but on 
wdiose part w^as this recoil ? In part the camp-followers of the 
good old cause, who had followed it, like Pepys, when it was 
in fashion and furnished good pay, but glad to throw off the 
mask of outer conformity when the fashion turned and prof- 
ligacy was in rule. But, in another party, the license was in 
those returned from exile, adherents to the Royal party, who 
had dangled around Continental courts in their exile, and now, 
when the peril was past and the great Protector dead, who ran 



THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC, 263 

riot with all unmanliness of revenge and all brutality of indul- 
gence. But another part of the old Puritan party were in 
their conscience adherents to the cause which they loved; 
houseless, without stipend or shelter, but writing, and preach- 
ing, and suffering — how effectively the literature of Non-con- 
formity, issued from under the edge of the scaffold and from 
within the prison gratings, shows to this day. Decried they 
have been as the enemies of learning. "Was Pool — was Gale, 
author of the "Court of the Gentiles" — was Owen — any one 
of them — less than a scholar of high attainments ? The great 
preachers and writers of the Restoration in the Established 
Church, like Tillotson, and Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor, and 
the elder Sherlock, and South even, were men who had re- 
ceived their college training in the days of the Commonwealth 
and the Protectorate ; and their powers and their works show 
that Puritanism, to them at least, was no ungenerous or unsuc- 
cessful school-mistress. 

England boasts, in sacred literature, of her Polyglot bearing 
the name of Bishop Walton. Though himself of the Estab- 
lished Episcopal Church, that great work was prepared while 
Puritanism yet ruled in Britain ; and in consequence some 
copies, now rarely met, contain a dedication to the great Pro- 
tector Cromwell, under whose auspices it was first launched. 

The Revolution of 1688, that saved England from absolu- 
tism, and achieved under William III., was in a great measure 
but the return of those free institutions prepared under the 
Commonwealth, suppressed by the Stuart Restoration, but re- 
placed and redintegrated, so to speak, by the accession to the 
British throne of a scion of the illustrious Protestant lineaire 
of Orana;e in Holland. 



264 , ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

While, then, English literature cherishes the names of Milton 
and Bunyan ; while the history of the land must admit the 
greatness of that Oliver Cromwell whose image among her sov- 
ereigns her Royalist prejudices will not permit her yet to in- 
stal ; while the closets and sanctuaries of England retain the 
writings of Howe and Baxter and Owen and Reynolds ; while 
her more erudite inquirers turn to the labors of a Lightfoot 
and a Pool and a Gale, the honors done to Puritan loyalty in 
the vindication of great principles, and to Puritan nobility in 
setting God's truth above all sacrifices to be incurred in main- 
taining it, must go on ; honors that, the longer postponed in 
their full allowance, bring at the last a more overwhelming- 
arrearage on the part of those who must, sooner or later, face 
the account. 

As to the obligation of these United States to the New Eng- 
land forefathers, it is a topic that we need not here and now 
discuss. Its very scope forbids its having more than the 
merest allusion as we pass it, greeting while we pass. 

I. But acrainst the whole form of relio'ious feelin<]: and 
practice presented in the Puritan home and school, and town- 
rule, and state polity, an opposition exists in some minds that, 
if vague in outline, is strong in its dislike. It looks upon this 
aspect of Christianity as mystical. The word thus used in dis- 
paragement is itself of some vagueness. Borrowed from the 
more recondite practices of old heathenism, it characterizes that 
which is secret and hidden from outer scrutiny. Many of 
these mysteries in old paganism were pretentious and bootless, 
and others, again, were revolting and degrading. But true re- 
ligion is itself a life, and the Great Teacher himself presented 
his doctrines as a life, and claimed to have a kingdom " set up 



THE rUlilTAX AXD THE MYSTIC. 2G5 

Avitliin" liis followers. The closet was to be tlic personal con- 
ference-chamber between each true worshipper and his God, 
the searcher of hearts. Ilis proselytes, as Nicodemns learned, 
were to become neophytes of a change, internal and pervasive, 
a second birth, a true individual renovation. 

But among the early divergences from the true faith were 
those Gnostics who, infected by the influence of pagan philoso- 
phy and mysteries, would have something occult as the pos- 
session of favored disciples, imparted stealthily and under great 
and strict reserve. Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, under 
■whose inspection such forms of error would most naturally and 
largely come, denounced them as mysteries of infatuation and 
destruction. Speaking of the simplicity of the terms of ad- 
mission to the salvation that Christ gave, he, Paul, bids the 
learner not to seek to clamber upward, asking, "Who should 
ascend into heaven?" or to tread a crooked and slippery way 
downward — "Who should descend into the deeps?" The 
"Word near and clear — and clear as near — was in their minds 
and their hearts simple, present, and hearty trust in a perfected 
salvation from a present, divine, omnipresent, and almighty 
rescuer. 

But, spite of these warnings, inside of the Christian Church 
and outside of it in Judaism and the surviving schools of pagan 
philosophy, and afterward in Mahometanism, men's love of 
the occult and the mysterious and the recondite and the exclu- 
sive led them to favor a doctrine abstruse and difficult, com- 
municated by degrees and only through certain peculiar teach- 
ings of man's own spirit, or of angels, or of God himself, the 
Spirit apart from ordinary revelation in the written Word. 

The Jewish Cabala, and the secret discipline of the nominal 



266 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. 

Christian Church, and the eclectic philosophy of those Alexan- 
drians who sought to reform the old paganism into some sem- 
blance of clearness and of profundity borrowed from Christian- 
ity, that should fit it to rival and to replace Christianity ; the 
mystics of early monastic life, and then the later mystics of 
the Romish Church, like Eckard and like Tauler and like the 
anonymous writer of the " Theologia Germanica," an author 
once so admired and accredited ; saints of the Roman com- 
munion, like St. Theresa of Spain and St. Brigitta, and of the 
other sex, St. Bonaventura, have moved in the same direction. 

The mystic writings of Molinos in Spain, at first favored by 
one of the pontiffs, and then denounced; those of Madame 
Guion, favored by Fenelon, and then, as denounced by Bossuet, 
put under the pontifical curse, and disowned meekly by Fenelon 
when thus proscribed, all flow in the same channel. 

In Protestant Germany, Behmen, though but a cobbler, in 
Lis acute and solitary musings became the founder of a school 
whicb even Law admired, and which Sir Isaac Newton is said 
to have in some degree approved. It was a movement in the 
same channel. In later times Swedenborg has built up his 
system — a man of learning and genius, but whom John Wesley, 
personally knowing him, deemed of unsound mind. He has 
written largely and abstrusely. 

The Friends, or Quakers, were by some at least of the con- 
temporaries of their first founders. Fox, Barclay, and William 
Penn, thought to lay too muck stress on the power of the in- 
ward light, as distinct from or even antagonistic to the letter 
of written Scripture. 

A late French school of Martinez Pasqualis excited notice in 
our own day ; his followers were called the Martinists. 



THE PUlilTAN AND TEE MYSTIC. 267 

The younger Vanghan has written ably in his " Ilours with 
tlie Mystics " on some of these multiform schools, but without 
exhausting the theme or the literature, refined, complex, and 
bewildering as it is. 

Against mystic theology, alike Catholic and Protestant — 
that favored by the Romish Churcli and that denounced by the 
pontifical see — there lie the grand objections. Though true re- 
ligious life is and must be an inward and spiritual thing, there 
is fearful peril in making the first sources of truth to be the 
spirit of man, witnessing from its own resources and of its own 
authority. Here comes in rationalism ; dictating to God and 
recasting the divine oracles, or, as Coleridge said, once a prose- 
lyte himself to the error, " Every man the maker of his own 
Bible." The younger of the Newmans, Francis W. Newman, 
brother of John Henry Newman, lately made cardinal by the 
reigning Pope, Leo XIII., has thus passed, it is understood, from 
Christianity and the Christian Church to a creed of his own 
selecting and compounding — a deist, framing and authenticat- 
ing his own oracle. 

But there is another form of mysticism that may prove 
equally perilous, and lead more speedily to yet more audacious 
impiety. 

When man approaches — the Christian Scriptures within reach 
of his hand, and the Christ, the true light of the world, proffer- 
ed there to every inquirer — when, rushing past these, a man 
appeals to the supreme and creating spirit, God, repudiating 
the Christ and the Oracle, and the Paraclete promised of the 
Christ, to aid in reading and elucidating the Oracle, such in- 
quirer has no warranty in Providence and no promise of God's 
giving that he shall be saved from falling under the influence 



268 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

of that invisible but most potent teacher, the Father of Lies, 
^vho is permitted at times to veil himself to the presumptu- 
ous " as an angel of light." When Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
the brother of George Herbert, the sacred poet, and himself the 
father of English deism, wrote a book denying the possibility 
of a written revelation, he, nevertheless, in his rash self-confi- 
dence, asked an answer from Heaven sanctioning and endors- 
ing this new treatise. He thought himself to have received 
the sanction. But the multitude of Eno-lish deists since have 
never accepted his strange revelation as binding on them, or 
regarded as quite consistent, for himself, the first promulgation 
of this strange renunciation of his own principles. Revelation, 
which could not be to the race, might be — and was — to him, 
Herbert of Cherbury, vouchsafed. It was one of the legends 
that his Romish enemies coined against Knox that, grotesque 
as malignant, represented the Reformer as evoking by magic 
spells apostles for his patrons. When Satan appeared bodily 
Knox's confederates fled in affright, but he persisted. What 
was foulest invention as against that worthy may, to those ac- 
cepting Paul's literal statement of "the doctrines of devils," 
seem but too possible in the case of the self-reliant and Bible- 
defiant spiritualist. Such an one, summoning angels, may 
evoke demons. 

Rome, in her Theresas and her Bonaventuras, has added 
much to the Scriptures ; but it is often not added light, but 
only entanglement. The Thauler, whose book Luther so 
praised, recognized Mary, the mother of our Lord, as in some 
sort a mediator with her Son. Bonaventura, canonized as he 
is by the infallible Church, has gone so far in the same peculiar 
path that he took the whole book of Psalms and by a fearful 



THE PURITAN A XI) THE MYSTIC. 2C9 

temerity substituted Mary, the human mother, for the divine 
Messiah, in its whole structure, far as he could insert the cruel 
and irreverent interlineations into the record as inspired Psalm- 
ists, the prophets of God, left it. Another mediaeval mystic, 
Eckard, really furnished the pantheist system which Ilegel 
adopted centuries after. This wc learn from an independent 
and scholarly Catholic, Hegel's friend, who claims to have 
shown Hegel the mediaival authority, which the modern pan- 
theist gladly adopted. Spinoza, a learned Jew, was pantheist ; 
and modern rationalism in Germany has, even in such minds 
as Schleiermacher's, gone from apostle and prophet to seek 
higher truth in Spinoza, making all human history in its multi- 
form aspects but the rim and fringe, so to speak, of the Divine 
Essence permeating and swaying all nature. Hindoo Brahmin- 
ism went no farther. As to Swedenborg, the Christians of the 
world have generally passed by his new and strange additions 
to, and peiTcrsions of, the doctrines and oracles of Scripture 
with profound distrust and confirmed dislike. 

HI. How was the l^uritan guarded from all such mysticism ? 
Religious life was to him a warfare, an inner and home-felt 
reality. But in his mind and creed the Word — the written 
and inspired "Word — was the great standard of knowledge, 
duty, and hope, and blessedness. He found the fall of the 
first Adam there written, and confirmed by the wail of the 
race through the whole course of the centuries. To his own 
mind, thus warped and blinded and surrounded by malign and 
misguiding influence in the world, he might not trust. He 
searched the inner record, but he collated it with the outer 
record of God's book. In that volume he found his own 
right, personally, and apart from all churches, and synagogues, 

12* 



270 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

and pontiffs, and fathers, to come to God's one Christ, and 
plead that blood-shedding which availed for him personally. 

Individualism, in the Puritan system, has its highest rights 
and its noblest developments. It is, in the language of an old 
philosopher, in the religious existence of each devout student, 
*'a flight of one alone to God, the only One." He, the Jeho- 
vah, from Eden and from Sinai and from Calvary has spoken. 
His legislation admits no improvement. His promises and 
blessings require no amplification — letting out their tucks and 
seams, as by a rationalistic man-millinery — into broader devel- 
opments and fuller truthfulness. Variety and difficulty, need- 
ing patient meditation and devout collation and close scrutiny, 
he finds in God's book of nature, as well as in God's book 
of Scripture. Mysteries of this kind do not appall him. He 
finds, as did Job in his day, obscurities in the arrangements of 
the Divine Providence. He awaits the disclosures and fuller 
lessons of the Father's house on hio-h for their elimination and 
full illumination. The vast mass of the book is radiant with 
light and love and blessedness. 

But especially is he, in the images and prophecies of the 
earlier Testament, and in the histories and miracles and dis- 
courses of the later Testament, introduced to God in Christ, 
the son and equal of the Father. That Elder Brother is be- 
come his (the penitent's) kinsman and sin-bearer, the compan- 
ion of his pilgrimage, and the captain of his warfare. That 
battle of the brief earthly life is leading soon, and leading as- 
suredly, to full salvation. The character and face of the Sa- 
viour there displayed is its own evidence. Unparalleled it 
stands in the life of the race — amid the religions, and the phi- 
losophies, and the sciences — the one exhibition of perfect and 



THE rUltlTAN AXD THE MYSTIC. 271 

transcendcut holiness, wisdom, and beneficence, and justice. 
The righteousness thus revealed to simple faith was the hope 
of Augustine, of Waldo, of Luther, of St. Cyran, and Janse- 
nius ; of Pascal, and Leighton, and Owen, and Baxter, and Bun- 
yan. It is his — his own, personally and evermore. And the 
vision thus unveiled transfigures while it enlightens. The stu- 
dent is changed from glory to glory as into the Master's im- 
age. And these transmutations of character — many and mul- 
tiform, in so many centuries, in regions so remote — are sub- 
stantially a cloud of witnesses, ever broader and ever brighter, 
that girdle the book around with new attestations. And mys- 
terious as to the careless and perfunctory reader it may seem, 
he knows that Christ, beaming out thence, is the light of the 
world, the way, the truth, and the life. 

lie is bidden, as under the edge of this Tabor of a new 
moral transfiguration, to try the spirits. He docs not, there- 
fore, lightly credit a new voice, though claiming to speak in 
the name of a wide philosophy or a very exact material sci- 
ence, lie does not need infallible Church or infallible pontiff. 
Whither shall he go, you ask, to meet the loss thus occasioned ? 
We answer. He turns to a present Redeemer — with his people 
to the end of the world — a divine omnipotence and a divine 
omniscience, that is alike infallible as to its truthfulness and 
indefectible as to its consummate and immaculate holiness. 
But schools, traditions, and oecumenical councils would bar the 
way. As the individual, alone with his God, and by a right 
given to him from that God, he waives aside all such authority 
of mere man, as intrusive, presumptuous, and contradictory. 
Christ has now his throne of all power on the earth just as 
much as in the heaven. If so omnipresent and omnipotent. 



I 



272 Eli AS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. 

why did be, the Christ, not bar the way of bis martyrs like 
Paul to the throne and beadsman's sword of Nero ? Because 
suffering glorified the Master and purified the disciple apostle. 
The incipient errors and scandals of the Churches deserved such 
visitations of persecution, and were in many purged away by 
the discipline of the amphitheatre. And the antichrist, copy- 
ing tbe heathenism and clutching the power of pagan Rome, 
was to have its lease of seeming impunity till the guilt was 
ripe, and the impending bolt was, after being long poised, in 
the dire hour to fall. No earthly sovereign, on the throne of 
any European or Asiatic dominion, has the full, personal real- 
ity to the devout student that inheres in this Christ. To him 
— in the page of the opened Bible, given of him and revealing 
him, in his own individual right and his own individual duty 
' — the student comes. Christ ?5, more really than any one of 
you now is. Yours is a derivative, a dependent, a variable, 
and an imperfect life ; his, the underived, independent, unva- 
rying, and all -perfect life, upon which that of the universe 
hangs. Your knowledge limited, and your presence localized, 
his knowledge is the illimitable ; his presence is flooding, and 
overlapping, and bounding, as the sea bounds the shore, the 
whole continent of creation. This Saviour invites your and 
my approach, personal, prompt, and all-surrendering; his blood 
to cancel our sin, his grace to fill our vast accruing necessities. 
The praises of Israel girdle bis throne ; ay, their prayers to 
him, the Christ, are praises yet imperfectly articulated. They 
invoke a might not yet spent, a grace not yet weary. 

But, beyond his own personal work and influence, the Puri- 
tan finds sealed in this Scripture the open patent of his heav- 
enly sonship, tbe pledge of another advocate — another com- 



THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 273 

forter. Give to tlie name of the Paraclete either of these 
versions. The Son, ^vho is unforgetting, unswerving verity, 
pawns — so to speak, in all reverence — his own nature and God- 
head, that this new teacher shall take the things of the Father 
and of the Son, and show them unto the devout and patient 
reader. It is God's gauntlet thrown down, not in defiance, 
but in loving and fraternal encouragement, to betroth his 
Church to himself, in an unbroken fellowship and for an eter- 
nal reunion. Has not the Church proved the powers of that 
Paraclete? The missions of our day — the reforms, political, 
social, religious — are but new waves of influence emitted in 
brightness and felicity from this personal representative of 
the Father and of the Son. 

You say : But the sous are not always adhering to the les- 
sons and oracles of their fathers. Did God promise they 
should? Solomon could not have written the Psalms of his 
father David. Did the apostasy of the more lettered offspring 
throw doubt on the divine utterances of the less literate but 
more devout parent ? The children of the Huguenot nobility 
in France apostatized; did that blemish the graces of their 
martyr fathers, less fond of the world, and more fond of their 
God and his truth and his heaven? No; here again, as the 
Puritan holds it, individualism asserts its place. Each apart is 
called to come personally to a personal Saviour, by a personal 
Spirit, the individual renewer and enlightener and scaler. 

Of mysticism, in the sense of a secret communing of the 
individual soul with its God, Puritanism has what the Bible 
demands that it should have, " a fear of the Lord" taught, not 
by the precepts of men, but by oracles and Spirit and Son of 
God, to the lonely, isolated inquirer, who for himself re- 



274 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. 

pents, for himself believes, and for himself lives, obeys, and 
inherits. 

But a mysticism that substitutes the human reason or soul 
as authority above God, or that goes directly and apart from 
Christ to the spirit as of God (without any sufficient safeguard 
but that it is a false, misguiding spirit of demoniac assump- 
tion), is foreign to the first principles of the Puritan. A faith, 
Bible-bred and Bible-fed, at the feet of the one Redeemer and 
Propitiation, under the invocation of the one Paraclete, is the 
confidence in which he breasts the storms of this life, and in 
the strength of which he meekly looks to confront the opened 
books of the world's registry, and to hear the doom of an 
unalterable destiny. 

Deride it as the world may, let a " Hudibras " empty all his 
jests on the character and the creed — in Britain and in America 
— through nineteen Christian centuries, the Saints, the Catliari, 
the Puritans, have brooked the world's jeers, taunts, and calum- 
nies ; and when that world could, and when they dared, — dart 
and sword and rack and stake have been added to the con- 
tumely. But the verdict of history already is against the 
world and with the Puritan. See the language of Lord North- 
brook (of the Baring family, so widely known to commerce), 
but lately the Governor -general of India, presiding a few 
weeks ago, in London, at the anniversary of our Baptist For- 
eio'n Missions, and attestins; from his own Indian observation 
that in eighty years the faith of Carey, Marshman, and Ward 
has wrouo'ht a chanoie which would to themselves at the beoin- 
ning of those eighty years have seemed sheer impossibility. 
But a few years since a nobleman of his position, an officer 
wielding supreme power in India, would have lost caste by the 



THE rUniTAX AND THE MYSTIC. 275 

recognition. The next eight years may precipitate, in God's 
good providence, in a tithe of the time, yet greater changes than 
did the last eighty. We know in whose book it is written 
that nations may be born in a day. But God's Christ lives, 
resistless and unswerving, a vigilant omnipresence, and woe to 
the Church or creed that undertakes to constitute herself or 
itself an administrator on the effects and chattels of a deceased 
Christ, as their rationalism or their Vaticanism holds it — 
evanished and dead out of his throne, and leaving spirits human 
or superhuman to seize on his void heritage with the prompt 
craft of the old husbandmen in the Gospel parable : " The heir 
killed, and the inheritance ours." Though invisible, Jesus is 
no absentee proprietor. The Messiah holds the literature, com- 
merce, and science of the centuries as his own appanage ; and 
the Spirit enswathes and can wield them all, as the upper air 
wraps our globe. Skies, morally, in their arid gloom as brass, 
his touch can melt into the showers of a Pentecost as wide as 
it shall be sudden ; and the Zion of God, with a household 
speaking all of earth's polyglot dialects, shall exclaim, as they 
avouch one faith and invoke one Lord : " Who hath begotten 
me these?" 



INDEX. 



Adercrombie, Sir Ralph, 249. 

Adrian VI., 194. 

Alciat, 207. 

Alexander YL, 121, 123, 128, 130. 

Alfred the Great, 253. 

Allies, 12. 

Anabaptists, 196, 216, 221. 

Ananias of Damascus, 10. 

Andrewes, Bishop, 258, 261. 

Anthony, St., 47. 

Antinomians, 196, 

Apocalypse, date of, 35, 40 ; lessons 

of, 43 ; false interpretation of, 

164. 
Apocrypha, Re3-nolds on the, 219. 
Apollonius of Tyanea, 15. 
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 222. 
Arians, Persecution of, 218. 
Aristotle, 177. 
Arkwright, 253. 
Arnauld, Angelique, 53. 
Arnold, Benedict, 141. 
Asoka, Buddhism established by, 96 ; 

holds synod, 97. 
Assassination, papal, 55. 
Athanasius, 91. 
Audin, 199. 

Augsburg, Diet of, 194. 
Augustine, birth of, 71 ; youth of, 



77; as a commentator, 78; St, 
Beuve's estimate of, 79 ; works 
of, 80 ; compared to Goethe, 81. 
Ayasuluk, modern name of Ephesus, 



Bacon, Lord, 52, 218. 
Balaam, 141. 
Balfour, Sir James, 240. 
Ban of Pope and Empire, 204. 
Banks, Sir Joshua, 160. 
Barclay, 266. 
Baronius, 54. 
Barrow, 263. 
Basil, 49, 75. 
Baths of Nero, 14. 
Baxter, 256, 260, 264. 
Beale quoted, 100. 
Beatoun, Cardinal, 237. 
Becket, Thomas a, 112. 
Behmen, 266. 
Bellarmine, 222. 
Bembo, 210. 
Benares, 94, 95. 
Benedict, 50. 
Bengel, 42. 
Berenice, 27. 

Bernard, St., Luther's estimate of, 
50, 130, 222. 



278 



INDEX. 



Beschi, 54. 

Beugnot, 73. 

Beza, 211. 

Black Prince, 114. 

Blake, 261. 

" Blast of the Trumpet against the 
Monstrous Regiment of Women," 
243. 

Boadicea, 13, 

Boileau, 24. 

Bollandists, 54. 

Bonaventura, 266, 269. 

Bonner, Bishop, 220. 

Borgia, Caesar, 130. 

Borgia, Roderic, 130. 

Bossuet, 79, 198, 224, 266. 

Bos well, 160, 161. 

Bothwell, 236, 246. 

Eourdaloue, 224. 

Bradford, John, 240, 241. 

Bradwardine, 130. 

Brightman, 42. 

Britannicus, murder of, 5, 26. 

Broglie, To. 

Broughton, Hugh, 261. 

Bucer, 194. 

Buchanan, George, 227, 237. 

Buddha, birth — leaves home, 93 ; 
finds disciples at Benares, 94 ; be- 
comes a mendicant — wife and son 
become proselytes — his death, 96 ; 
in Roman calendar as St. Josa- 
phat, 99. 

Buddhism, history of, 93-97 ; teach- 
ings of monastic schools, 97; sup- 
posed connection with Therapeu- 
tae and Essenes, 98 ; contest with 
Brahminism, 98 ; compared with 



Christianity, 99 ; deficiencies of its 
teaching, 101-106, 109. 

Buddhists, estimated number of, 91. 

Bunyan, 140, 190, 260, 262, 271. 

Burns, Robert, 133, 229, 249. 

Burrhus, grief at Nero's stage-play- 
ing, 10. 

Caaba, shrine of the, 143. 

Cabala, the, 265. 

Cabet, 60. 

Caesarea, Paul at, 1. 

Caesars, the early, 3. 

Calamy, 78. 

Calderwood, David, 258. 

Calmet, 54. 

Calvin, John, 197; stands next to 
Luther, 205 ; his influence, ih. ; 
birth, 206 ; education, 207; assid- 
uous study, 208 ; at Ferrara, 209 ; 
settles at Geneva, ih. ; style mod- 
elled on Cicero, 210; compared 
with Luther, 211; his edition of 
Seneca on Clemency, ih. ; Insti- 
tutes of, 212; goes to Basle and 
Strasburg, 213 ; return to Geneva, 
ih. ; his great activity, 214 ; trans- 
lation of the Bible, 215 ; influence 
on French style, ih. ; his marriage, 
216 ; Jesuit slanders against, 221 ; 
great power, 222 ; compared with 
Augustine and St, Bernard, ih. ; 
system of theology, ih.; friend- 
ship for Knox, 242. 

Campbell, 249. 

Campbell, Sir Colin, 249. 

Caractacus and the Britons, 13. 

Carey, 274. 



IXDEX. 



279 



Carlstadt, 194. 
Casaubon, 212. 
Cathari, the, 258. 
Cerinthus, 34. 
Ceylon, 96, 97. 
Chalmers, Thomas, 249. 
Champagny, Comte de, 73. 
Changing the word of a king. 111, 

135. 
Charles V., 192. 
Cheke, Sir John, 235. 
China, 97. 

Chivalry, Ages of, 179. 
Christ, the security of the Church, 

18,19. 
Christians, early, 16. 
Chrysostom, birth of, 71 ; youth of, 

75 ; made archbishop, ib. ; exiled, 

76 ; as a commentator, 77. 
Church, its union with Christ, 201 ; 

its growth, 202. 
Cicero, 7. 

Claude of Turin, 130. 
Claudius and Agrippina, 3, 7. 
Clement, 55, 
Clement VII., 118. 
Clootz, Anacharsis, his evidences of 

Mahometanism, 138, 139. 
Cobbett, 250. 
Cobham, Lord, 120. 
Coke, 256. 
Coleridge, 267. 
Coligny, 224, 261. 
Coliseum, 29. 
Columbus, 175. 
Confucianism, 92. 
Constance, Council of, 119, 124. 
Constantiue the Great, 70. 



Corderius, 207. 

Councils, their unchangeableness im- 
aginary, 201, 202. 

Cromwell, 256, 264. 

Cross in heart, not on shoulder, 180. 

Crusades, period covered by, 163; 
causes of, 164 ; preached by Peter 
the Hermit, 165; Children's Cru- 
sade, 166; second crusade, third 
crusade, 168; fourth, fifth cru- 
sades, under Louis IX., 169 ; their 
failure, 170; against Albigenses 
and Stedingers, 171 ; numbers sac- 
rificed in, 175 ; results of, 177-179. 

Cunningham, 79. 

Dante, 252. 
D'Aubigne, Merle, 199. 
De Bure, Idolette, 216. 
Do Saci, 54, 225. 
D'Estouteville, 55, 56. 
De Thou, 212. 
Dickson, David, 258. 
Dies Ira?, 53. 
DoUinger, 197. 
Dominic, St., 51. 
Domitian, 28, 30, 67. 
Donatists, 78. 
Dort, Synod of, 226. 
Douglass of Cavers, 141. 
Dugnet, 226. 
Dura, Plain of, 110, 149. 

EcKARD, 266, 269. 
Edkins, 108. 
EdwardllL, 115, 169. 
Elijah on Carmel, 157. 
EHot, 256. 



280 



INDEX. 



Eliot, George, portrayal of Savona- 
rola, 123. 
Ellicott, Bishop, 76. 
Elliott, E.B., 42. 
Ephesus, 21 ; Church at, 22. 
EjAstolce Obscuroi'iim Vh'orum, 53. 
Erasmus, 125, 191,194, 210. 
Erskine, 249. 
Essenes, 46, 47, 98. 
Eudocia, Empress, 76. 
Evelyn, 140. 

Faber, F. W., 53. 

Family — its origin and necessity, 58, 

59, 60 ; influence on Augustine and 

Chrysostom, 82. 
Farel, 209. 

Felix, Tacitus's estimate of, 6. 
Fenelon, 79, 224, 266. 
Flathead Indians, 61. 
Flechier, 225. 
Fletcher of Madeley, 223. 
Francis 1,211,217. 
Francis of Assisi, St., 51. 
Frederick of Prussia, 139. 
Frederick of Saxony, 190. 
French Institute, 197. 
Formation of Christendom, 72, 73. 
Fourier, 60. 
Fox, 266. 
Fuller, Thomas, 119, 219. 

Gale, 263, 264. 
Gallio, 1, 7, 12. 
Garnet, 55. 
Garson, 53, 126, 130. 
Gataker, 261. 
Gautama, 94, 96, 99. 



Geddes, Jenny, 254. 
Geneva, 213, 223. 
Gentile Churches, 39. 
Gibbon, 50. 
Gillespie, George, 258. 
Gladstone, 198. 
Glaire, Abbe, 221. 
Gnostics, the, 265. 
Godfrey of Bouillon, 166. 
Gray's " Elegy in a Country Church- 
yard," 254. 
Gregory VII., 164, 222. 
Gregory XVI., 200. 
Grey, Lady Jane, 234. 
Grosseteste, 119, 130. 
Grotius, 223. 
Guiccardini, 130. 
Guion, Mme,, 266. 
Guises, the, 235. 
Guthrie, Thomas, 249, 260. 
Guttenberg, 145. 

Hamilton, Patrick, 237. 

Hamilton, Sir William, 198, 249. 

Hampden, 226, 256, 261. 

Hardy, quoted, 99. 

Hare, Archdeacon, 78, 198. 

Harris, Howell, 256. 

Harrison, 261. 

Havelock, 259. 

Hegel, 269. 

Henderson, Alexander, 249, 258. 

Henry IV., remark of, 220. 

Henry VIII., 193. 

Henry, Philip, 255. 

Herbert of Cherbur^', 268. 

Herculaneum, desti*uction of, 29. 

Hervey, 256. 



1 



ISDEX. 



281 



Hooker, 226, 257. 

Hooper, 261. 

Hospitallers, institution of, 167; 
tlicir decline, 170. 

Howard, John, 93. 

Howe, 264. 

"nudibras,"255, 274. 

Huf^uenots, 224. 

Hume, David, 187,254. 

Huss, John, 112; birth and death of, 
1 1;} ; defending Wyeliffe's works, 
124; persecuted and driven from 
Prague, 124; brought before coun- 
cil — makes his defence, 125 ; safe- 
conduct broken — burnt to death, 
125, 194. 

Hutton, Richard H. — estimate of 
Mahomet, 140, 156. 

" Imitation of Christ," 53. 
IndividuaHsm among the Puritans, 

270,271. 
Indulgences, sale of, 187; in South 

America and Mexico, 188. 
Innocent III., 128, 169, 222. 
Ircton, 261. 

Jacob at Penlel, 162. 

James II., 224, 262. 

Janeway, John, 260. 

Jansenius, 78, 22.5. 

Jeffreys, 249. 

Jenner, 253. 

Jephthah, 45. 

Jerome, 74. 

Jerusalem taken by crusaders, 166; 

retaken by Saladin, 168. 
Jesuits, 175. 
Joachim of Floris, 42. 



John XXIII., 124; removed from 
pnpacy, 126, 128, 130. 

John of Gaunt, 114. 

John, St., 24 ; related to John the 
Baptist, 31 ; tradition as to mar- 
riage of Cana, 33 ; martyrdom and 
miraculous escape, 34 ; anecdote 
of, ib. ; profundity of thought, 41. 

Johnson, Samuel, 140, 160. 

Jonson, Ben, 255. 

Josaphat, St., 99. 

Joseph us, 25, 27. 

Judas, 129, 141, 150; Mahometan le- 
gend of his death on the cross, 
153. 

Juggernaut, 128. 

Julian the Apostate, 71. 

Julius Ca3sar, 2. 

Kaime.<?, 219. 

Karens, 108. 

Keach, 200. 

Kingsley, Charles, 6. 

Knox, John — his character, 228, 248; 
his scene of labor, 229 ; birth, 233 ; 
education, 237; call to the min- 
istry, 238 ; taken captive by the 
French, 239; anecdotes of, 239, 
240; offered Bishopric of Roch- 
ester, ib.; visit to England, 241 ; 
preaches in Frankfort and Gene- 
va, 242; return to Scotland, 243; 
meeting with Mary, 132, 245, 246 ; 
vigor in the pulpit, 247; death, 
248; friendship for Calvin, 211. 

Koran, 139, 142, 145, 148; compared 
"With Bible, 151 ; its defects, 152, 
219. 



282 



INDEX, 



Lacordaire, 54. 

Lamaism, 97. 

Lamennais, 54. 

Latimer, 109, 240, 241, 261. 

Lavelaye, 198. 

Lawson, Admiral, 262. 

Leibnitz, 109. 

Leighton, 271. 

Lenau, Nicholas, 122. 

Leo X., 128, 131, 188. 

Leslie, Charles, 140. 

Lessing, 217. 

L'Estaples, 207. 

Libanius, teacher of Chrysostom, 72, 
75. 

Lightfoot, 264. 

Lindsay, Sir David, 232. 

Lively, 261. 

Lollards, 120. 

Louis IX. of France, 169. 

Louis XIY., 25. 

Loyola and the Jesuits, 51, 52. 

Lucan, 12. 

Luther, Martin — remark as to the 
Exodus, 69 ; son of a miner, 184 ; 
age in which he lived, ih. ; birth, 
185; studies at Erfurt, 186; be- 
comes a monk, ih. ; becomes pro- 
fessor, ih. ; sent to Rome, 187; 
made vicar-general, \h. ; nails the- 
ses to church-door, 189 ; summon- 
ed to Rome, \h.; refuses, but ap- 
pears before legate at Augsburg, 
ih.; protected by Elector, 190; ap- 
peal to German nobles, ih. ; ex- 
communicated, 191; burns bull, 
ih. ; at Diet of Worms, ih. ; con- 
cealed at Wartburg, 192 ; trans- 



lates Bible, ih.; reply to Henry 
YIII., 193 ; controversy with Swiss 
Reformers, 194; with Erasmus, 
ih. ; marriage, ih. ; his death, 195 
character, ih. ; " Table-talk," 196 
ill effect of Swiss controversy, ih. 
position in Peasants' War, ih. 
controversy with Anabaptists, ih. 
work for German schools, 197 
personal Christianity, 198; resort 
to God's Word, 200 ; did not claim 
infallibility, z6. ; referred to, 123, 
144. 

Machiatel, 130, 131. 

Mahomet, 140 ; various views of his 
character, 141 ; compared with 
Benedict Arnold, ih.; Judas and 
Balaam, ih.; complexity of his 
character, 142 ; left an orphan — 
brought up by an uncle — mar- 
riage, 143 ; enforciug belief by 
the sword, 145 ; denouncing im- 
age-worship, 146; his license, 148; 
claim to have been foretold in 
Scripture, 155, 171. 

Mahometanism, 146 ; acknowledging 
predestination and divine sover- 
eignty, 147; allowing polygamy, 
147, 148 ; proposed accommoda- 
tion with Christianity, 150 ; proph- 
esies Christ's return, 154; prob- 
ably overthrow, 156, 170, 171 ; 
Christendom, sections of, 149. 

Makkedah, Cave of, 84, 85. 

Malebranche, 79. 

Mamelukes, 169. 

Mara, 95. 



INDEX. 



283 



Maracci, 142. 

Margaret of Navarre, 209. 

Marshall, 55. 

Marshman, 274. 

Martel, Charles, 146. 

Martinez Pasqualis, 2G6. 

Mary Queen of Scots, 112, 132, 234, 
236 ; marriage with Darnley, 246. 

Massillon, 225. 

Massuet, Dom, 78. 

Material and spiritual, 252-254. 

Mather, 257. 

M'Crie, 122, 233. 

Mede, 42. 

Medicis, Catharine de, 235. 

Melancthon, 123, 194; influence on 
schools, 197. 

Melville, Andrew, 248. 

Mcssalina, 4. 

Metastasio, 25. 

Michelet, 199. 

Miletus, 22. 

Milne, Walter, 231. 

Milton, 262, 264. 

Miscreant, original meaning of word, 
179. 

Molinos, 266. 

Monasteries, establishment of, 48. 

Monasticism, meaning of, 45 ; origin 
of, lb. ; persecutions and abuses 
of, 52, 53 ; hymn-writers and mis- 
sionaries of, 53, 54 ; lessons of, 57, 
63 ; solitude and retirement of, 64, 
65. 

Monica, 82. 

ilontalembert, 54. 

Montmorencia, 207. 

Moore, Sir John, 249. 



Moravians, 127. 

Mornay (Du Plessis), 224; allusion 
to the Scotch, 229. 

Mummery, derivation of word, 179. 

Murray, Earl of, 247. 

Mysticism — its relation to Rational- 
ism, 267 ; distinguished from Pu- 
ritanism, 274. 

Mystics, Catholic and Protestant, 
266. 

Xapier, 42. 

Napoleon, handwriting of, 36, 158. 

Napoleon, Louis, 3. 

Narcissus, 9. 

Nats, 108. 

Neander, 77. 

Nebuchadnezzar, 111, 149. 

Nelson — victory at Trafalgar, 113. 

Nero — youth of, 5 ; called Ahenobar- 

bus, 4 ; first five years of reign, 2 ; 

murder of his mother and wife, 8 ; 

death of, 14, 15. 
Newman, F. W., 90, 267. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 42. 
Nicephorus, 31. 
Nicola, 226. 

Nirvana, 97, 103, 106-108. 
Northbrook, Lord, 274. 
Northumberland, Earl of, 241. 
Norton, 257. 
Noyon, Calvin's birthplace, 206. 

OCTAVIA, 4, 8. 
Olivetan, 207, 215. 
Owen, 256, 260, 263, 264. 

PAcnoMius, 47. 
Palestine, 163. 



284 



INDEX. 



Pallas, brother of Felix, 6. 

Papal power, 1'72. 

Paraguay missions, 55. 

Parthia, scene of St. John's aposto- 
late, 33. 

Pascal, 52, 221, 225,271. 

Pascal, Jacqueline, 53. 

Patmos, 23. 

Patriarchal religion in Arabia, 143. 

Paul — appeal to Ctcsar, 1 ; persecu- 
tion of, 10 ; at Rome, 11 ; at Eph- 
esus, 21. 

Peace, true and false, 129. 

Pearson, 63. 

Peden, Alexander, 249, 250. 

Penn, William, 2G6. 

Pepys, 140, 262. 

Persecution in Scotland, 231. 

Petavius, 54. 

Peter in prison, 85, 86. 

Peter the Hermit, 165. 

Philip IL, 217. 

Pius IX., 200. 

Plato's " Republic," 60. 

Plautius, 13. 

Pomponia Graecina, 13. 

Pool, 263, 264. 

Poor, Gospel to the, 145. 

Poppfea, Sabina, 8. 

Port Royal, 53. 

Prayer, power of, 84, 85, 86 ; condi- 
tion of growth, 87, 88 ; for the 
Spirit — its answers, 155. 

Prayer-mills in China and Thibet, 
108. 

Preaching, 69, 70. 

Prideaux, 142. 

Prophecy, study of, 42. 



Protestant, origin of the name, 194. 

"Provincial Letters," 52, 221, 225. 

Pulpit and Press, 88, 89. 

Puritans, the, 255-257 ; origin of the 
name, 260 ; services to learning 
and freedom, 261-263 ; influence 
on literature, 262 ; accused of mys- 
ticism, 264. 

Pym, 226, 256, 261. 

QuESNEL, 54, 225. 

Racine, 25. 

Rationalism, German, 158. 

Ravaillac, 55. 

Reason, Goddess of, 139. 

Reformation called Deformation, 

183. 
Reiser, 78. 

Religions, comparative history of, 92. 
Renan, 139. 
Renee of Ferrara, 209. 
Renwick, 260. 
Reuchlin and Hutten, 52. 
Reynolds, John, 218, 258, 261, 264. 
Reynolds, William, 218. 
Richard the Lion-hearted, 168. 
Ridley, 109. 
Rizzio, murder of, 246. 
Robespierre, 158. 
Rome, meaning of the name, 4, 5 ; 

burning of, 12. 
Roscoe, 122. 
Rough, John, 238. 
Rousseau, 139, 223. 
Rouvigny, 224. 
Royer-Collard, 226. 
Russell, Lady, 224. 
Rutherford, Samuel, 258. 



INDEX. 



285 



Sacred Fire, fraud of, iT-i. 

Sadolet, 210. 

St. Bartholomew's Massacre, 132, 
217. 

Ste. Beuve, TO. 

St. Brl-itta, 2CG. 

St.Cyran, 79, 225, 220, 271. 

St. Simon, CO. 

St. Theresa, 2GG, 2G8. 

Saints, as a term of derision, 2oG, 
259. 

Sakya Mouni, 94, 99. 

Saladin, 1G8. 

Salome, mother of St. John, 32. 

SiHinterer, derivation of word, 179. 

Savonarola, 111; birth and death, 
113 ; his great influence, 120; per- 
secution and death, 121, 122; va- 
rious estimates of, 122 ; his work, 
123. 

Schleiermacher, 2G9. 

Schopenhauer and Nirvana, 107, 108. 

Scotch, Buchanan's judgment of the, 
227 ; character in days of Knox, 
229; worthies of the, 249. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 229, 249. 

Selden,25G, 261. 

Seneca, 7, 9, 

Servetus, 140,210,217. 

Shakspeare, 120. 

Sheppard, 220, 257. 

Sherlock, 203. 

Siberia, 97. 

Siege of Jerusalem, 27, 28. 

Sigismund, Emperor, 124. 

Simeon Stylites, 47, 48, 210. 

Sixtus v., 222. 

Smith, Adam, 249. 



Smith, Bosworth, 141, 150. 
Smithtield, 133. 
Sobieski, John, 14G. 
Socialism, 02. 
South, 2G3. 
*^pinoza, 200. 
Spires, Diet of, 194. 
Stafford, Sir Thomas, 112. 
Stamboul, origin of the name, 24. 
Star, falling, in Revelations, 144. 
Steere, 79. 
Strasburg, 213, 215. 
Success, what constitutes, 128. 
Sully, 224. 
Sutclive, Dean, 220, 
Swedenborg, 206, 2G9. 
Swift, translation of motto l)v, 1S2. 
Syria, promised to Al)raliam, 172; 
Jews return to, 173, 175. 

Taaoism, 92. 

Tancrcd, 166. 

Tauler, 186, 206, 268. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 77, 203. 

Templars, institution of, 107; their 

decline, 1 70. 
Tetzel — sells indulgences 187; his 

claims, 131, 188. 
Teutonic Knights, 107. 
Thackeray, 6. 
Therapeuta?, 98. 
Thibet, 97. 

Thomas ii Kempis, 53, 126. 
Thomas de Celano, 53. 
Tillemont, 53. 
Tillotson, 203. 
Titus, eulogies of, 25 ; youth of, 26, 

27 ; friendship for Tacitus, 25 ; 



13 



286 



INDEX. 



magnanimity of, 28, 29 ; death of, 
SO; Talmudic legend as to, 31; 
referred to, 164. 

Trajan, 2. 

Truth and heresy, 17. 

Tzschirner, 73. 

Union with Christ, 272. 

Unitarians and Mahometanism, 140. 

Urban II., 165. 

Urban VI., 118. 

Ussher, Archbishop, 250, 261. 

Vane, Sir Harry, 256. 

Vassy, massacre of, 245. 

Vaughan's "Hours with the Mys- 
tics," 267. 

Vespasian, 13, 27. 

Villers, 197. 

Voltaire, 54, 93, 109, 226. 

Von Bora, Catharine, 194. 

Vows, rash, 45, 46. 

Vulgate, Wycliffe's version founded 
on, 116. 

Waldo, 271. 

Walsh, Vicomte, 185,221. 

Walter the Penniless, 165. 

Ward, 274. 

Wartburg, Luther's Patmos, 203. 



Wesleys, the, 223, 256, 

Weston, Dr., 241. 

Whitefield, 256. 

Wilberforce, 256. 

William III, 263. 

William of Orange, 112, 261. 

Williams, Roger, 257. 

Williams, Rowland, quoted, 91. 

Wilson quoted, 94. 

Wilson, John, 249. 

Wishart, 231. 

Wolmar, 207. 

Worldliness, effect of, on the Church, 
36, 37, 38. 

Worms, Diet of, 191, 194. 

Wycliffe — referred to, 78 ; birth and 
death, 113; early history, 114; pro- 
tection of John of Lancaster — re- 
tires to Lutterworth — his "poor 
priests," 115; translation of the 
Bible, 116 ; sickness and recovery 
—publishes the "Wycket," 117; 
assails papal see as Antichrist, 
118; writings circulated in Bohe- 
mia — his body exhumed and burnt, 
119. 

Xayier, 54. 

ZisCA,127. 



THE END. 



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X) 



•* V 



